Yountville Veterans Home Cemetery. Veterans Day, November 11, 2014 (Melanie Boling, Imagery Beyond Borders, 2014).

Some people travel to Napa, California to party; I traveled to Napa, California to document and honor a group of both living military heroes and the military heroes who we have lost.

On that particular Veteran’s Day Weekend in 2014, I had interviewed a 99-year-old Jewish Army Air Corps Veteran from Yonkers, New York. She was a spicy little piece teeming with sarcasm and a welcoming demeanor you just wanted to hug it out with.

I of course asked her “the question” I asked anyone in any interview that I have ever given as a journalist, “Do you have any regrets?”

She replied that she, “regretted not being closer with her family and establishing more bonds with the people she loved.”

She thought of herself as a “good person”; but, at this stage in her life “to be all alone in a Military Veterans Home, it had given her more time to reflect on the things that she “should” have done in the 99 years she had been around.”

This particular conversation imprinted on me in a way that allowed me to re-evaluate my own perspectives on life.

In all the interviews that I have ever given as a journalist, I always choose to take pieces of that subject’s wisdom and apply it to my own circumstances. Given that I was right in the middle of closing one major chapter of my life, and beginning a new one, I felt like it was exactly what I needed to hear, at the exact time I needed to hear it.

Life is about perspective. Two people could go into the same situation and walk out with two completely different experiences simply because they are in fact, different people.

Different backgrounds, different circumstances, different goals, different character (or lack thereof).

For me, I make the coherent and cognitive choice to be a good human every single day of my life because that is who I am and who I will always strive to be.

I don’t do it when it’s convenient or to achieve an agenda. What you see is what you get because that’s the way it is.

Don’t appear to be a good human just because a camera is rolling or that’s how you curate your social media to appear to others.

Land of the free, because of the brave. #usa

About the author:

“Boling's research is part of her Graduate Studies at Harvard University where she examines "extreme environments" and how they can have potential negative impacts on humans operating in the extreme environment. Implementing "psychological field kits" are a way of mitigating negative variables such as abnormal human behavior and abnormal human psychology that can play a role in team degradation.”

Melanie Noelani Boling, Extreme (ICE) Environments Behavioural Ecologist, Peer Wild; and Graduate Student of Neuropsychology, Harvard University.