Military Life is Like a Snow Globe
Recently, I’ve seen a number of posts on Facebook and heard a number of comments made about how people outside military life just don’t understand it.
It’s true.
Those that are outside this life can see it, but may not understand why we let our lives be shaken up and moved around, or why we deal with separations among many other aspects of this life. The other day I got to thinking about it and the life we live is much like a snow globe to those on the outside looking in.
Every day, Uncle Sam takes that snow globe and shakes it up really well. The snowflakes are sent into a frenzy, and they don’t ever land where they were before. This shake-up could be a PCS, a TDY, a deployment, or simply a short training exercise that changes the course of a daily routine. We find ourselves in a number of different places over the course of a military career, with a number of different jobs, and sometimes speaking a number of different languages.
It’s very easy to get frustrated with those who don’t understand—those civilians who think that all of these changes aren’t worth it. When you look at the big picture of things, at one point in time, we were those civilians who didn’t understand what the military life really entailed.
The only real exception to that is those who grew up as military brats, but I have found even those that were born into a military family have found being a military spouse is a completely different challenge. This is one thing that I have often forgotten when talking with friends of mine that are outside the military.
A small percentage of us live in this snow globe every day. Although from the outside looking in, it seems crazy, when we look around our snow globe we see it as a place of beauty. A place where the flakes may fall next to us that brings friends close again, or allows us to explore a different country, or brings opportunities that we wouldn’t have had otherwise.
