I know that national service is really a very far-away experience from a Nazi concentration camp, and its kinda insensitive to parallel the 'good life' NSFs are experiencing to inhumanity. However, Just to borrow the concept of it, Frankl expresses the NS time experience perfectly. To put things in another way, our time has this ability of moving fast and slow at the same time. Fast because when we're out of the camp into our former realities, so much seems to have changed (and our weekends are like gone almost immediately -_-). Slow because when we get back into camp, we live by the moments and look forward to moments (Breakfast.. Morning break.. Lunch.. Afternoon break.. Dinner.. Evening break, repeat for 5 days and....... Book Out!) Fast because when we look back, it seems like only yesterday that you had hair. Slow because when you're in pumping position and waiting to be recovered, the sun just happens to be sunning very brightly. Fast because all your old friends are all changing and moving on in someway or another... and slow because you seem so close, and yet not near to anyone of them at all. 

On a side note, I think a great way to disprove panentheism (the true believers please) is to get them to do drills. Then we try to synchronise everyone's timing, to march in step, stamp at the same time, and repeat for like a month, five times a day under the hot sun.  Maybe they'll get to appreciate more how they're just part of a larger conciousness and will fade into the drilling contingents  in sync with the parade commander's direction -_-

Seriously speaking, what impresses me the most(and i think the rest of society would probably agree)  is not nice drills. A performance nor a rank does not prove anything if one does not gain actual respect. Its not the 'Morning Sir's or the salutes that we should be looking for - a nod from a Guest of Honour to command the parade does not beat a nod from the Coy's cleaner when you help him to clear up the rubbish he has to pick up daily. 

Even a panentheistic-ally similar squad can display such respect when they finish off they're standard 20 push-ups with 3 more - "One for Myself! One for FI! One for the squad! 1-2-3, permission to recover sir!"

Such a moment of true honour, sincere humility and consistent unity - a moment that all can smile at, as we await the next moment to surpass us. 

-- An ode to the gate, Creative Reader 

I guess one thing I can appreciate my National Service's mundanity is the great equalising it does to everyone. Equally bald heads, a common routine, a communal living and recreation space, a fixed lights out time.. Crudely speaking, our individualities are commanded to be surpressed into the crowd. This is reinforced by punishments we get for moving in sedia position because we disrupt the stillness, not marching in step with the rest and simply just being punished as an entire group because a single person did something wrong/un-uniform. 

And I appreciate it, because seriously, how often can one get such a lesson in humility? The trainee phase of national service, the time when one is really just the "lowest lifeform" in the training academy. Such treatment is a good reminder to think about the state of man before God. In the words of Paul, "For who regards you as superior? What do you have that you did not recieve? If then you recieved it, why do you boast as if you had not recieved it?" (1 Corinthians 4:7)