A Secure Career and an Unsettled Mind
Professional achievement, growing disagreement with the system, and the decision to leave a secure military career.
MY ADULTHOOD
A Secure Career and an Unsettled Mind
As a commissioned military officer, I was doing well professionally. Yet achievement and inner conflict existed together.
I found it difficult to accept aspects of the system and its structures, within the military and beyond it. The idealism I had absorbed while growing up repeatedly collided with the practical realities before me.
From where I stood, there seemed little room to live by those ideals as fully as I wished.
I also began to understand what being a “paper tiger” meant to me—the distance that could exist between authority on paper and the ability or willingness to act.
A secure government career offered much. But I felt there was more to learn about life than how to remain safely within it.
Eventually, I decided to leave the military and begin a civilian career.
Looking back, I can see that leaving an institution and freeing oneself from conditioned thinking are different undertakings. I could change my profession and surroundings. Understanding the expectations, judgements and conflicts I carried within me would take considerably longer.
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