Entry 24.15

I believe I would be remised if I didn’t talk about Thanksgiving this week. The older I get, the more thankful I become. It’s part of maturing that I wish I could say is natural, but I don’t think it actually is. I believe that it is hard to be thankful. Like a lot of the topics that I cover, being thankful is a skill. It is something that you have to learn to do and continue to work at to be really good at it. I know that I definitely wasn’t always good at it. I spent a lot of time in therapy after my last deployment and it was one of those skills that they had us work on. One skill that I have been really good at it my ability to follow things logically, adjust for the outcomes due to humans being messy, then predict outcomes. I’m not sure there is a one-word answer for what that skill is called in English, but I’m sure the Germans have a work for it. If you know anything about the German language, they seem to have a word for everything. I guess “perspective” could be the best term. I can just mentally step back, detach myself and consider issues from different viewpoints and angles. Maybe “critical thinking” could work, but I digress This skill of mine, whatever we call it, I have adapted it to start being more thankful the things going on in my life. But that doesn’t always make it easy.

Being thankful is really hard, especially when what you are thankful for initially hurt you. This hurt could be physical, emotional, mental, or social. It could be even worse when you did something nice for someone and then they turn around and slap you in the face for it. When I was just out of college the first time, my best friend from college was getting married and he asked me to be his best man. So, I did the normal thing, I got some of our other good friends together and planned a bachelors party for him. Now we were probably a little different than most of you where we really didn’t enjoy drinking or going to bars. I mean for my first bachelor’s party we went bowling. We enjoyed going fishing or hunting or just spending time doing stupid stuff like goofing off with fireworks (we did skeet shooting once with bottle rockets instead of clay pigeons. Really gets interesting when the rockets would change directions and head back at the dude with a loaded shotgun) or seeing how many Mentos it takes to blow up one of those blue water jugs (its quite a big boom). So we did the thing that for us was fun. We kidnapped our buddy (like black bag over his head into the trunk off the side of the street) and headed out for a couple days in the wilderness. We even read his fiancée in, so she was completely aware, and she thought it was a great idea. Until it actually happened. She freaked out. My phone started blowing up with texts and calls. When I finally answered, she was frantic and accusing us of planning a trip to Vegas to get up to all the stereotypical bachelor party stuff. Needless to say, we turned around, dropped him back off to his fiancée and waited because he said he would calm her down and then we could resume the trip.

Except his call never came. Thirteen years later I am still waiting for that call. Jared has talked with Dave and Rob and resumed his friendship with them, but I haven’t spoken to him since that day. Part of that is my fault. I got bitter and angry and for a long time refused to change my attitude towards Jared because I had tried to do something nice for him (in our own weird way) and I felt like he was in the wrong, not me. To me, never getting that call, even if it was him telling me that he couldn’t go with us, was a slap in the face. It wasn’t until 2019 or 2020 that I finally faced that decision. Not his decision not to call me, but my own decision to be angry and bitter at him and his fiancée (now wife) for so long. That’s when I started using that skill I talked about in the beginning and attaching it to my ability to be thankful. Am I thankful that he never called me back? That a good friendship was burned to the ground in the blink of an eye? As hard as it was to see and admit, yes. Now just because I am thankful for it, doesn’t wish that the young and stupid me would have made another decision and kept that friendship alive. But eventually that event and the decisions made during and afterwards were something I was thankful for. Because that event taught me so much about myself and about other people. It might have taken almost a decade for it to do so. But it did. And I wouldn’t be the person that I am nor in the position that I am in today if it wasn’t for them.

The same goes for all the events in my life. We all have those events. For everyone they are different. Just because you haven’t experienced the same “big” events that I have in my life, doesn’t mean that you don’t have your own events with long term lasting impacts on your life. If you asked me whether or not I was thankful for 3 major TBIs, chronic neck pain, getting shot, nerve damage in my left arm, multiple migraines a week, having friends killed in action, etc., my answer would be yes, I am. Was I thankful right away? O no. Definitely not. I was angry. I felt like my life had just been ripped apart by someone else and I was the one left standing there trying to suture back together the pieces. But as I stand here in my office, without those events happening, I wouldn’t be the person that I am today. I wouldn’t know any of you. I wouldn’t be married to the most beautiful, intelligent, fierce and bold woman in the world. I think that I would be more lost now than I was after all those events. It’s a funny thing that happens to a soldier who goes through the hell of war. We hate it and love it at the same time. And when war ends, we feel like our purpose ends, and we don’t know what to do any more. I look around at my friends who are still in and some of them hate it. Rangers aren’t meant to be in endless training waiting for the next thing to kick off. We are meant to be walking through the dark, kicking in doors and closing with and destroying the enemies of our Country. And that just isn’t happening anymore. I think if I hadn’t been hurt, I would be more lost than I was.

And so yes, I am thankful for all those things. Because it put me here with you all. God, the fates or whatever you believe in brought me here. Through all the negative events of my life, I have been molded and changed into the person that you see today. Don’t misinterpret me, I’m not saying I’m pretty or awesome. I just know that I am in the right place and that only happened because of all those things. Learning to be thankful for all the pain and hardship in your life is hard. It’s a skill that you have to work on and develop. Do you think I enjoyed taking the PAT ten times? Nope. It’s a badge of shame sometimes to say it took me that long. But I learned so many lessons from all those attempts and it has made me a better teacher and coach because of it. So, I polish up that badge of shame and wear it proudly because without it, I know I wouldn’t be able to help some of you. Now comes my challenge to you for this Thanksgiving. I want you to make a list. Not of the things you are thankful for. But a list of the trials and tribulations that you have faced in your life. This could be quite a lengthy list. My initial one was. I think it was 7 pages long (I was 33 the first time I went through this exercise). Once you have that list, now start going through it and write down one thing you are thankful for from that negative experience. It may not be easy at first. Remember, it’s a skill. It will get easier as you go down the list. Don’t rush it. Mulling each event over isn’t easy or fun when they are hard memories to face. But the way you see yourself and your life, will change. You will see how important those events were in your life, and you will learn to be thankful for them.