Of Run

Running is 60% mental and 40% physical. Agree?

While more often than not, our feets or our legs will give up on us and say "hey you up there, stop making me run! stop stop! what if we die together now?"

but really.. how many of us have tried running till our legs literally gave way and can't manage standing up again? Basically, there's always that little bit of energy in our legs that keeps us going despite saying and insisting that we can't go on anymore..

back in the training days, we used to run from thomson road all the way to adam road hawker center or orchard road's Shaw.. the runs will typically start in the early mornings and end within the morning itself too..

i recall that once, our FI(field instructor), which was covering for our actual FI(who went for SEA games), entered our barracks at ard 5am and switched on the lights.. i awoke from my sleep still recovering from the exhaustion from yesterday and our FI, in his biking(read:bicycle) attire, declared "gentlemen, its so early in the morning, why are your still sleeping? Fall in in 10mins!"

some 10mins later, a bunch of half-awake guys in white top, white-shorts and black shoes waited for their FI.
"have your done your warmup yet?"
"No sir!"
"never mind, we'll warm up along the way"
And off we went..

That morning, we made the run from thomson towards newton, we crossed every bridge that we came across and then cross back again, so that up,down, up down and back on the same side of the road.. we stopped in weird places to do push-ups and crunches.. and we finally stopped at Shaw in orchard.. not a soul in sight, its the early morning anyways.. and then we ran back.. we hardly stopped.. it wasn't important if ppl were left behind or not.. u knew the way back and we just had to keep going to keep the person or the cluster ahead of you in sight.. traffic lights broke up the squad once awhile, that just means jogging faster to spot another white a few hundred metres down the road.. our FI set our pace, we just had to follow and not stop

amazing, we kept going and going and we made it back in time for flag-raising at 0700hrs.. coming in strong from the main gate.. we took time to regroup and form up.. joggin back into the academy as a squad.. the 39'ers!

left right left! our feets stomped in unision.. nothing could stop us from taking our place at the front of the parade square.. left right left and we came to a halt.. heavy breaths, shoulders raising and falling with every expansion of the lungs.. breathe.. breathe..

a surreal aura of smoke appeared from our shoulders.. those who were close enough would not miss it.. this emission of smoke was from the sheer exhaustion of running and running and not stopping.. the energy that was dispersing from our bodies.. our bodies that we battered this early in the morning..

what gave us that energy? what drove us to achieve?

run guys run

we're the 39'ers

Of Serving

What exact is Service? Service is a provision of a good that is not physical in nature, yet, it requires a physical body to provide this "good" to the recipient.

My job now requires me to create a service culture amongst a wide variety of people, each with different levels of competency, motivation and knowledge about service. In a way, this is a social engineering project to mould the mindsets of people and change behaviour.

Pavlov's classical conditioning equates behaviour to certain cues that can be used to trigger positive behaviour. At the workplace, incentives in the form of bonuses, time-off and/or recognition from bosses are colleagues are some of the possible sources of motivation. Move higher up the ladder and big words like Self-Actualisation comes into play.

Oh yet another note, every male Singaporean and second generation PR are liable for National Service. Within such parameters, is it fair to require those who are enlisted to provide this service with a heart? To go the extra mile so as to speak? National Service - NS - National Slavery, when young men are enlisted by law to be trained as soldiers, police officers, fighter fighters and everything else for 2 years(i did 2years and 4mths), what kind of service levels would you expect from these men?

The service doesn't just stop there, on a yearly basis, majority of the ex-National Service Fulltime (NSF) are recalled after their Operationally Ready Date(ORD) for Reservist duties, some slip through the sytem due to various reasons and never put on another uniform again.
These men form a pool of resources known as National Servicemen (NSmen). From F to men, must be quite a change. We drop our job responsbilities and risk incurring the wrath of bosses and appraisial ratings to report back to respective units for duty.

Who do we serve when we report for such duties? Our unit? Our Country? Our People?

Sometimes, the level of service is afforded to those who we think deserve it, there's a correlation between what we are willing to give and who we serve, that could be a form of discrimination, but surely we can use our freedom of thought to decide what we want to do isn't it?