If, for a career, you had to choose between something for which you were considered the best in the field, or something you loved from the deepest parts of your being, which would you choose? What if what you deeply loved, except in rare circumstances, wouldn’t provide you with a secure or even viable income? People make these choices every day and, in our ‘enlightened society’ the results of those choices are more than evident. Also evident is how much easier it is to sit with our friends and espouse our loves and beliefs that it is to actually live them.
Tab is Master Sergeant Linda Taborra Gray who is, possibly, the finest signals intelligence analyst in the U.S. Army. She is also a woman who, when much younger, promised her Irish mother she was only doing one tour in the Army to get the GI Bill. She didn’t want to be one of these students working two jobs and carrying a full load but missing her education because she was too tired to pay attention. So she did her one tour and was ready to get out, to not be a ‘lifer,’ when her commander almost begged her to reenlist. He was head of a new project and her skills would round out the team perfectly. Wouldn’t she reconsider? Just three more years? And soon you looked on these people as family, you trusted them. And there was always another project, another mission for which desperately needed your skills. It became easier to put off your dream, or in Tab’s case harbor it, nurture it privately, give it just enough space to grow a little. Someday the time would come.
So how, exactly, do you just exchange identities in the middle of your life? How do you stand in a field of buffalo one day, then step over a fence the next and say ‘now I am a lamb?’ For that’s what it is, a decision to step into a new world, wear a different skin, learn a new language, new customs, and learn how to translate useful
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