There is a real romance attached to special forces, especially when filtered through books and movies. Discipline, brotherhood, mastery under pressure, mythic testing of the self. But that romance usually edits out the moral residue. Carrying acts that do not align with your inner compass, wars that later reveal themselves as incoherent or unjust, and the long psychic aftermath. For someone wired like me, that dissonance would not have worked for where I needed to grow. It would have been a weight. This is not a critique of the warrior path, but a way of looking at paths and trends that society puts forth.
The artist's path does not get the same cinematic glow, but it has its own rigor. Watching Mick Jagger or Iggy Pop is not about rebellion for its own sake. It is about pushing the limits of embodiment, expression, and presence. They are not escaping discipline. They are channeling it through a different nervous system. The same is true of great guitar players, dancers, and writers. They are testing how much truth a human body and mind can carry and still stay alive.
That is the parallel with special forces that does not get named often enough. Both are about capacity. One is romanticized because it serves power structures. The other is tolerated because it does not.
Karma matters here. Karma is not about what looks noble from the outside. It is about what pulls you and what will not leave you alone. It is about what you have to do in order to become whole. A soul does not choose the path society applauds. It selects the terrain where its work actually is.
I was born to hippie parents and exposed early to art, music, and Asian philosophy. That was both a gift and a destabilization. I was not handed a single narrative and told to stay inside it. That freedom came with existential vertigo. Other kids had rails, religion, culture, and certainty. I had openness, and openness without grounding can feel like falling.
Punk rock mattered because it gave me a reset. Not truth exactly, but a refusal of false certainty. A clearing of the table. From there, it made sense to look for something older than ideology. Primitive art, early human mark-making forms that emerged from survival and meaning-making rather than doctrine.
Wood carving held that truth. The material does not care what you believe. Grain runs where it runs. Cut against it, and you pay. Follow it, and the form emerges. Every carver anywhere in the world learns the same lessons. That is an embodied truth. That is also why Tai Chi found me. The body reveals what the mind endlessly argues about.
So when I chose art because it offered the most freedom, I would adjust that slightly. It provided the most honest constraints. Freedom inside reality, not fantasy. Wood. Breath. Movement. Health. Writing. None of these lets you delude yourself for long.
Seen from that angle, my life makes a quiet, but precise sense. Carving, health promotion, Tai Chi, writing, and community work in Taos help me translate ancient nonverbal truths into modern contexts where people are profoundly disconnected from their bodies and from meaning. I did not join the army, but I still serve. I did not go to war, but I work with suffering, discipline, and repair.
The question of where the best place for me is might not be geographic at all. It might be this. Standing at the intersection of art, movement, health, and meaning, doing the work that will not leave me alone. From a karma perspective, that is not indecision. That is alignment in motion.
It isn't romantic, but it is necessary.
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