A very good and necessary article, Kitty.
Personally I’ve found humor to be highly significant in getting through hard times (both the personal experience and the turgid novel by Dickens…).
Many years ago I was up in the Brecon Beacons most of the way through a selection course. On my back was a Bergen with 30kg inside; my shoulders were aching, my lower back was rubbed raw, my feet were bloody, my legs were beyond tired. Cold rain was pelting down at an extreme angle, propelled by a vicious wind that at times threatened to knock me off my feet despite the weight of the Bergen & the SLR I was carrying. I’d not slept more than a couple of hours per night for the last few weeks thanks not only to an intentionally punishing schedule but also to the fact many of those also on the course had clearly been chosen for their ability to Snore For England.
I’d heard some of the lads on the course talking in the four-tonners and in the mess, and it seemed like those who gave up had the mindset of looking ahead and thinking, “If I feel this fucked now, I’ve got no chance of getting through to the end.” Those who kept going seemed just to focus on putting one foot in front of the other until we were back in the barracks. (Not a good idea to relax at the FRV, by the way, because chances were there’d be an embuggerance waiting to test us further. )
Anyhow, I was trying to focus on the parts of me that weren’t complaining, like my stomach and, well, my stomach. I couldn’t control the wind, the rain, my fatigue, the weight of the Bergen, the RV mapref I’d been given, the unknown cutoff time, or anything else. But I could control when I put a bite of something to eat into my mouth and when I took a drink of water from my canteen. Had it not been pissing down I could have brewed up, but there was no chance of that so I just forgot about having anything warm inside me.
And then I slipped and fell.
The Brecons are used by Welsh farmers for the purposes of grazing their sheep. This means that the hills are covered with sheep-shit. And yes, I fell right into a rather nice example.
As I scrambled to my feet I looked at my hands and my BDU: the Vengeance of the Sheep had definitely struck. And then I thought, “I’m really in the shit now.” This truck me as absolutely hilarious (as I mentioned, I was very, very, very tired by then) and I started laughing. As I resumed my tab towards the next RV I realized the rain, which moments before had been just another embuggerance, was now showering the sheep shit off my hands and off my DPM Gore-Tex outer shell. This made me feel absurdly pleased. The net effect was that I reached the next RV in fine spirits rather than feeling sorry for myself.
Of course not all problems are so easily solved, but had it not been for my somewhat childish sense of humor and my delight at getting a free shower the day could have been much worse than it really was.
