I love this animated GIF of a soldier on the way to war, imagining himself back to the banks of a snowy river.

Throughout my life, I have imagined myself away from many unpleasant situations. When I was a little kid, I saw a movie called, Tribes. In this movie, a hippie has been recruited into the Marines. He endures the hardship of boot camp by imagining himself away to his hippie girlfriend and the memory of kissing her under a lush and beautiful tree.

You can see an example of this at the 5:30 minute mark here. The recruits are being asked to hold buckets full of sand aloft. Adrian is able to hold them longer than anyone else because he has imagined himself away.

So much of my view of life was from this movie. I love this scene where Adrian is calm after all their work, talking to one of the other draftees at the 8:46 mark.

“It’s all what you make it. Took me a long time to realize that yesterday can’t be changed and tomorrow really can’t be controlled with any certainty. I just kinda shoot for the minute. It’s all where your head’s at, man. That’s all that counts.”

When Sidney asks how he held up the buckets for so long, he explains it at the 9:52 mark:

“You just gotta put yourself in the right frame of mind.”

Once he teaches Sidney, then he, too, is able to hold up the buckets just as well as Adrian.

Even my views on drugs came from this movie. When Adrian sees one of the recruits, Quinn, taking a “downer,” they have a nice little talk about drugs that fit my views exactly. You can see it at the 0:56 mark:

“I’m hip to it. For two years, I couldn’t leave the house without downers. It’s really a drag tryin’ to face that every day. It’s insane. You know what happened then, Quinn? I started doing uppers to counteract the downers and function at a normal level, which is really just where I was at to begin with.”

I think I only saw this movie once as a kid, but it made such an impact on me that I can still remember him imagining himself away. I’ve used that technique MANY times over the years to get myself through hard times. The next time you’re trying to achieve something hard, try imagining yourself away and see if that helps you as much as it has helped me over the years.

You can see the whole movie here:

Animated GIF via: Vintage Photos Enter Spooky Afterlife as Animated GIFs by Underwire at Wired.com