Finding the pool of serenity when your life is on edge

By Jacey Eckhart

I've never seen her swim. I can only imagine Ginger in the water. I imagine her in goggles, her face turned to the bottom of the pool, her feet kicking out a rhythm, a cool flip turn at the end of the lane. I imagine Ginger in peace.

And Ginger shouldn't be this peaceful. She should be haggard by now. She should be jittery. Ginger has been an Army wife for more than 30 years. One of her children is a helicopter pilot. The other is at West Point gearing up for a career in the Army.

Because of her husband's job, Ginger attends a lot of memorial services for men and women who are much too young to die. Soldiers who are other people's spouses and parents, other people's tender sons and darling daughters.

While I can imagine Ginger in the water, I can't imagine what it would be like to carry that kind of worry every day. How do people do that? I've been to funerals. I know they leave you drained for days even if the person was 90 and in pain.

How do you handle it when you witness the loss left by even one soldier? How do you handle that constant reminder? Me, I would just keep circling the McDonald's drive-thru, swallowing burgers and pushing down the emptiness.

But Ginger swims. I don't mean she just exercises, in the way that magazine articles might tell us to fight stress by sleeping well and eating right and staying active. (Burn CALORIES! Create ENDORPHINS!) There is more to those things than just checking them off a to-do list.

While Ginger swims, she recites the 91st Psalm. Not just the verse "You will not fear the terror of night, nor the arrow that flies by day." Ginger printed out a copy of the psalm and took it to the pool in a plastic sleeve. She memorized the 16 verses and recites them while she swims, focusing in turn on her husband, her children, her neighbors, these soldiers.

I'm not telling you about this because it is some kind of magic and you should go jump in a pool. I am telling you about Ginger because she is deliberate in her efforts to handle what her military life has to offer.

She deliberately chooses to quiet her mind, to quiet her body, to focus on her Army family. I see this in a lot of experienced military wives - which may be why they have managed to stick with it so long and have fewer face furrows.

I want to be that kind of person myself. I want to have a deliberate practice of military life. Not all the time. Just when I need it. Because the closer my life resembles a normal civilian life - regular meals, a constant dent on my mattress, another adult to license the cars or paint the cabinets or recite multiplication tables - the less I need to be deliberate.

It is when things get edgier, scarier, less predictable, less normal (in all the blessed sense of that word) that you and I need to be deliberate. When you are so worried that you don't know what to do next, when you are pacing, when the thought of the safety of your family member is with you every minute, then you need to be deliberate every single day.

Not only to do the walk or the run or the swim, but to do it in a deliberate combination with a spiritual practice that centers, calms and provides peace. Because it looks to me like that makes all the difference.

Jacey Eckhart, a military/life consultant in Washington, D.C., counts Hampton Roads among her family's duty stations. Her column, which previously ran on The Pilot's military pages, is courtesy of CinCHouse.com. Email: Jacey@ JaceyEckhart.com.