Pick a Reason.

Transitioning from the military back to civilian life can be one of the most difficult periods of a person’s life. There’s culture shock. There is adjusting to a life without the camaraderie and the sense of belonging you get in the military. All of a sudden you go from a world where you know what is expected of you to a world where expectations are often confusing and ambiguous.  

One of the biggest difficulties to transitioning, I think, is the loss of a sense of purpose. In the military, you don’t often have to guess at your purpose – its generally supplied for you. There is a mission that needs to be accomplished. 

No such sense of purpose is supplied for you once you transition back to civilian life. That can lead to a real sense of loss. It can make you feel hollow. That hollow feeling can see impossible to shake.   

There are books and classes and articles that delve deeply into how to overcome that feeling. This isn’t that. This is just one of my own thoughts. 

My suggestion is to pick one reason. Choose one thing and make that your cause and your project. You don’t have to be an expert and it doesn’t have to be a long term cause, but find a subject and jump into it. 

There is a school of thought, existentialism, that explains that the universe isn’t going to give us meaning or answers; that we have to create our own. If the civilian world doesn’t always make sense or have meaning, that’s ok. We can pick one thing that is important to us and make sense and meaning out of that one thing. We can decide for ourselves who we are and what is authentic for us. It can start with just picking one thing, one reason. 

Its hard to drag yourself through the transition from military back to civilian life. The absence of a sense of purpose can make that seem even harder. But picking one thing, one reason, one project – from woodworking to mentoring, to cooking, to anything – can help give us that meaning back. And it can be one step back to finding ourselves.