What Do I Do With The Time I have Left?
For those following our house-hunting saga, here is a quick update. We put forth an offer, they countered, and we accepted it. The next step is to send in the earnest money and get the inspection taken care of. We close in less than a month! Having our housing situation pretty much taken care of is definitely a weight off of my shoulders. Although, I forgot about how stressful spending this much money upfront is. I felt the same way last time we bought a house, which my husband reminded me of. But, still, it is hard to basically empty our savings to cover closing costs and moving (because we all know that the “military pays for everything” doesn’t quite work out that way).
With this box checked off, our time in Oklahoma is quickly coming to a close. We move in 91 days, which feels like a lot now that I’ve counted it out, but things are definitely going to start moving quickly. We list our house next week, and we still have a ton to do to prepare it for pictures. Then, we head off to Ireland for a little over a week. At some point, our household goods will get picked up. And in December, we head to Punta Cana for a week. My son and I will probably move to Georgia early to start the unpacking process, depending on when we have to move out of our house in Oklahoma after selling it. I think we’ll be saying goodbye to our Oklahoma house and life before we know it.
It’s all really exciting. I love the new house, and I am beyond thrilled to be closer to family. My mom and I practiced the 6-hour drive to go house hunting, and it was super easy (plus my flying son did great on the road trip). Now that we are down to just over three months in Oklahoma, I am sitting with the question, what do I do with the time I have left?
This is such a great question to ask for any stage of life. We all have great plans and dreams for our lives. And most of us don’t know how much time we have left on this earth. We get to ask this question for the broad strokes of what we want the impact of our lives to be. We get to decide what we want to leave behind when we go. We get to think about how to leave the world a better place than we found it.
We can also think about this in a much smaller context. The Household Six podcast talks about leaving our duty station better than we found it. We can interpret this in two ways. First, we want to leave the physical duty station in a better position if we can. Maybe we can help clean up the playgrounds. Maybe we can establish a great spouses program. Maybe we could bring back dog Fridays at the squadron and significantly increase morale. There are so many things that we can do on both a large and small scale to make the base better than it was when we got there.
The other thing we want to do is leave the base with ourselves being better than when we got there. At the end of our time at a duty station, we will be older and hopefully a little bit wiser. We will have gone through things that we can now guide others through. We can be better advocates for our needs and the needs of others. We can leave the base happier, healthier, and more adjusted to military life. Maybe we found a new dream to chase. Maybe we started taking medication that is changing our lives. Maybe we realized how good things can be and decided to refuse to settle for less than we deserve.
I know that I, personally, am leaving Tinker better than I found it. My husband and I have a fantastic marriage that we had only just begun when we arrived. We are parenting an extraordinary baby boy, and I am excited to grow further into the role of motherhood. I have found my big dream and am chasing it with everything I have. I am certainly better than I was four years ago, and I still have plenty of work to do so I can keep improving at every base I go to.
I don’t know that I am leaving the base better than I found it, though. I have certainly made friends and shown up for people, which I know has profound ripple effects. But, for a long time, I wasn’t involved in the base in any way that would have made a lasting impression, at least not that I know of. I was a member of the spouses club, which was certainly better when I arrived. Today, the seasoned spouses are running the club and trying to stick to more traditional things that tend to turn young spouses away. My involvement has always been from a participation in the activities perspective. While I did have a short stint on the board, I didn’t enjoy what I was doing, and being part of it didn’t really make sense during the stage of life I was in.
I was a key spouse at my husband’s squadron, but the program was very inactive for the first two years of that position. It’s only become more involved now that I am leaving. We came to this base at the beginning of Covid, then entered a deployment, then pregnancy and motherhood. I’ve had a lot of things that pulled me away from the base and a lot of events that I avoided because I was either child-free or my son was too young.
But I have 90 days to leave the base better than I found it. There’s still time to make an impact, no matter how small. It’s time to start figuring out what that will be. I am certainly open to ideas if you have experienced something that has impacted your base or if you’re at a base experiencing a problem that needs solving. I’m guessing the problems that our spouses, service members, and bases face end up being pretty universal. I’ve taken my sweet time to make an impact at Tinker, and I will begin with the end in mind at our next base, ensuring that I take full advantage of the three (hopefully more) years we’ll have there. For now, I will hold my friends close. Let them know they are loved and that their dreams matter more than anything else. I will encourage them to chase, and hopefully, one day, I will get to be on the sidelines watching them come true.