Endurance and Time, and Opportunity
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2024/05/25
I went to the heart of war last year between November 22 and December 6 of 2023. The idea was to experience the nature of war from a first person perspective. This was not my idea, but a new colleague and friend. In fact, it was something in which I had not expected doing in the first place, but this was something – in hindsight – that I needed.Something to push out certain mental blockages unknown before.
War, in contradistinction to the claims of my colleague and friend Remus Cernea, is not precisely Hell, as in a realized hellscape brought from the depths of human imaginative misery-making, inasmuch as a phantasmagoria of normalcy broken down into its constituent parts and then reorganized in non-normal ways. War, in this sense, can be abstracted and concretized simultaneously as a violence upon the collective imaginarium.
A culture’s set of ideas about itself actualized in historical contingencies of time, place, architecture, infrastructure, and the like, rendered soluble and reconstituted. Whatever comprises a culture’s ideas of itself, as actualized in the mind and eventually in the real world – and fed back into minds and so on, its chaos rendered unto that, piecemeal and in whole. This definition more accurately mirrors the violence upon individual psyche’s in all relevant aspects.
Take, for example, the ideas of an elementary school. It represents a symbol of hope and function. A hope for a new generation and a function of producing educated citizens of a culture. Whether majoritarian indoctrination of democratic societies in a status quo for the sake of the quotidian or authoritarian centres to maintain the standardization of the minds of the proletariat to the level of eternal functionaries, plebeians, education, insofar as characterized as information transfer from educator to pupil, can fit into either category on these antipodes for a simplistic spectrum.
One of the sites Cernea showed me was an elementary school. This school was completely destroyed. I recall first asking if this was bombed by air. He responded in the negative. The site had been completely obliterated merely by the ground fighting between the Russian and Ukrainian forces. What struck is the playground, basketball court, tennis court, and track surrounding those were entirely intact – the Farben Works are still intact, so to speak, these are human choices. Not normal, two mothers began walking around the track during our visit with their infants or babies in strollers. An air raid alarm went off, and the mothers didn’t flinch. Everything individually could be considered a normal circumstance, but jumped into non-normalcy. That’s the bizarro effect of war on culture, violence on a society.
War as not only collective violence, but dual-use violence on individuals and a people. I needed to go and see that. Even though, in contradistinction to prior modes of operating, and promises to myself to not enter into a war zone, I decided to take the offer of Cernea and go, so full credit to him for the offer. An older self would not have gone, not-so purely and quite-complex actually. By “promise,” as I have referenced elsewhere, I interviewed and worked with one colleague who was going to a school in the States.
Their dream was to be a war correspondent, which, in my lack of experience, and in purview as a remote writer for a British magazine, I found absurd to personal safety and such because it was – as I saw accurately – “absurd to personal safety and such.” I was, in a matter of speaking, of the sensibilities of the vast majority of Canadians – even those coming from city centres or the cosmopolitan and, typically, more formally educated sectors of the society. I am decidedly a bad Canadian, naughty Scotty.
Those used to economic progress, a soft life, soft(er) educational challenges, few(er) hardships, not much in the way of manual labour in any sector of life, and a true belief in the common, State lies of any society to its people. Which is to say, as with most of the West, a common people commonly soft, in sensibilities and mind.
Anywho, I trusted instincts and went off to the lime-dark of a war zone for two weeks visiting six cities: arriving in Chisinau, Moldova and then going to Odesa, Mykolaiv, Kherson, Dnipro, Kharkiv, Kyiv, and then back to Chisinau. The exhaustion of travel and sleep deprivation is not necessarily good for you, but can be good for you – in terms of development of endurance.
You should make a practice of the development of endurance earlier in life rather than later in life because capacity to recover decreases with time; the body is bound to the ability to use its healing factors, as in youth, and instead more reliant upon inflammation as age begins to progress beyond youth. If young enough, you should make certain breakages of mind to develop certain psychological resilience factors and skill sets requiring significant exertion.
The trouble is the time contraction-expansion factors in youth compared to aging more. I notice the natural rapidity of time sense with aging a bit. This has benefits for other functions. However, if I had travelled earlier to a war zone, I may have been more careless. While, at the same time, there is a benefit in taking the time to go through an endurance test. War zones are good for it.
The downside to travelling in such circumstances as a youth is the expansive sense of time, where each moment can seem as if an eternity. Minutes both psychologically – empirically – and subjectively are longer to the individual when younger than when older.
Travelling, the time between cities in Ukraine has been an instructive sense. Where, my time in youth was spent mostly in solitary contemplation, study – and plenty of writing which may never see the light of day. I learned several items of import, mostly from the old. One is the nature of time. To reconstruct the past from a fragmentary data set called a memory, we live at a juncture between a fragmentary future and a partial constructed past. Subjectivity is a flux construct.
Time is a flux construct; pain is a flux construct. This needs some massaging. Some of the stretching happens naturally. But if you can force pain, and force endurance over extended periods of time, then you can find an internal elasticity – how much depends on you.
Ukraine was an instructive reflection of sleep deprivation, effects of mild aging, changes in time sense, and the echoes in one’s information matrices of mind. There’s a richer edifice to partake, subjectively. This, as with decreased healing, increased inflammation, and faster time sense, happens naturally. Those, as with many things Nature bestows, are natural, unavoidable; thus, you can find ways to work within these facts, given the contingencies of time and opportunities given to you, and use the dual-pressure of constraints and freedoms Nature bestows to personal edification.
Ukraine stands as an example from personal experience.
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
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