Retrospective But Relevant

A couple of months ago, my brother faced some eye-opening experiences. But as many of us know, when our eyes are opened, it doesn’t always mean we know where exactly to finally look. He needed his older sister – authoritative enough to guide him, but young enough to be able to see things from his perspective. I regret that I was only reachable through the powers of technology, where silence is rather distancing and sometimes deafening, when in fact he needed the kind of comfortable silence that happens only when two people share a singular space of affection and quiet understanding.

I tried my best to supplement the distance and the wistful silence with what I felt was the two greatest tools I have always had (and yet I feel I need to make a disclaimer – I mean that they are what have been most effective for me from experience, but not that I have mastered either or both of them completely): I used my heart and my words.

This weekend I realised I needed to heed my own words as much as I hoped my brother did. One of the many tricks to life is that we recognise how we are our own worst critics, but hardly see how we are also our own best advisers. So I place my words here, in a place (insofar as you can consider the internet a place) where I can easily look back on it, and in a place where, if anyone should need it, it can easily be found. (Needless to say I’ve excluded some things that were more personal in nature.)

 

Hi Kuya,

 

I can imagine how much you must be going through, and although I cannot say that I know exactly how you feel, I can say at the very least that I understand.

You have dreams, I know how this feels. I am a dreamer, just like you, and it makes all the sense in the world, because we were raised by two dreamers. But those dreamers have also been very hard workers. And although dreaming came to us possibly inherently and genetically, hard work is something we must do on our own.

Remember that you are human – this will determine many things.

Being human means that you have a great capacity for intelligence, for strategy. That you have been physiologically made to be able to withstand pressure, stress, challenges that are emotional, mental and physical.

That you have been given biological and psychological traits to accomplish great things, to survive, and also to evolve, always learning new ways to adapt and go beyond those before you.

But being human also means limits. You have been given intelligence, but you are not all-knowing. You have been given strength, but you are not invincible. I suppose what matters most is that we humans have been given a capacity for change.

And it’s up to us, to take that capacity for change to make us better, or make us worse. To improve our lives and the lives of others, or to be insignificant or worse, unhelpful.

Everything you are going through now, all your frustrations, your sense of limits, is a sign of growth.

Just think of shoes and how you outgrow them. This is how you know you’ve come to a point for new shoes – when your old ones pinch your feet, and make it difficult to walk.

And you can buy the exact same pair, or a completely different one, but in a size larger and more able to accommodate how you have grown.

You are frustrated and uncomfortable about the situation because you have outgrown it – you have surpassed the mental capabilities of those who have started this project. You’ve grown so much that all you can do is think outside of the box, while they still think inside of it.

And that’s okay.

My main concern is that you end up letting the success of your dreams ride solely on the success or failure of someone else’s.

It’s okay to be helpful – of course it is even encouraged. But remember that you are most helpful when you are whole.

And by whole, I mean fully intact with your hopes, your dreams, your determination and will.

Others can gain from your wholeness. You become more of a help, an inspiration,

But both parties only lose when you become divided – you go about things with just half of yourself, and others have very little to gain with just little parts of you.

So don’t forget to take care of yourself. This is the best way you can help sometimes. Take care of yourself and become someone whom others don’t have to worry about.

And then because you are so well taken care of, you will find you are able to offer more.

Sometimes what we think are our weaknesses are actually our strengths in disguise – we just haven’t mastered our will to turn it into our ally rather than our enemy.

Another way to look at it, I guess, is the way they say monks train to be ninjas (haha).

They run with iron shoes, heavy andpainful. They master the pain, and the weight.

And when they try to run without the shoes, they find that they learned to run much faster, although while running with iron shoes, they weren’t running fast at all.

Sometimes the journey towards the goal looks or feels nothing like the goal itself, but when you get there, you get to appreciate everything that brought you to it.

          All the answers you need are inside of you – some answers just require a bit more bravery to acknowledge.

         Just be cautious in turning to easy ways out – easy ways out come in so many different forms that deceive us

         sometimes into thinking it’s the ONLY way out.         I know you’re strong, that you’ll pull through.

        Take care, just email when you need me. 🙂

        Love,

        Ate

The pursuit of something good is not always the pursuit of something easy: sometimes it is brutal, it’s exhausting, it’s repetitive, it’s boring. Sometimes it’s uneventful, painful, discouraging. But if you cease your pursuit of something good, simply because it ceased to be easy, then you determine for yourself just how deserving you are of that good you wanted to achieve. This is something my brother and I are learning together, despite the age gap, the situational differences, and the distance. And I don’t believe it’s a lesson anyone can ever truly master – it will impose itself on us many times over, in different forms, from different angles, but each time we are faced with it will be a different learning experience from the last. So here’s to more attempts at trying for the good, instead of trying for the easy.

Resilience

There, it is
there that space
in which she finds herself:
finds herself stuck between
rocks and hard places,
herself pacing back and forth
strength and weakness,
swaying to the rhythm of her
indecision, marching to her
heartbeat drum.

There, it is
there that space
in which her life unfolds
a dozen, hundred, thousand,
million ways, to answer:
What must I do?
Where must I go?
Whom do I trust?
Caught between the human nature
and that nature of life
that betrays or rises above.

There, it is
there that space
in which she discovers
there would be no wrong,
no error, no Great Fall:
perhaps pain, sometimes sadness,
lack of laughter, but
all choices, all lessons,
wisdom yet to be had.

There, it is
there that space
in which she finds herself.

Yes I’ve Been Time Travelling, No It’s Not What You Think

I’ve been home for almost a month now, but true to my nature, I slip in and out of my retrospection. Repeatedly my conclusion (if it even is a conclusion) is this: Has it really been a year?

Admittedly, it’s been difficult to really keep a clear sense of time these past few years. Having been a student in Manila makes me register the year as June to March, while being an ordinary human being lets me acknowledge the year as January to December. When I began my preparations for London, my sense of time simultaneously shifted and multiplied, acknowledging the year to be from September ’til July, knowing two sets of twenty-four hours, and almost feeling like I was a time traveller. Conversations with my family and friends in Manila – which both occurred in “yesterday” and “today” – often delved into my life and my friends in London, referring to “today” and “tomorrow.”

Regardless of how I look at it, however – London time, Manila time, January to December, September to July – it feels as if so much has happened in the past 525,600 minutes of my life. James, one of my teachers (and I’m now also glad to be able to call him a friend, and a dude) asked me right before the (London) academic year ended: “You’ve changed a lot, haven’t you?”

Fortunately or unfortunately, being at a loss for words is not a frequent occurrence for me, but being faced with that question certainly left me blank. Did he actually mean for me to answer that, or was it more rhetorical? There were so many ways to really understand that question, but I found I was left speechless either way. Had I really changed? Was this a bad kind of change? Oh God, please don’t let me be one of those kinds of people who change after an experience, and then go back home to friends only to be told with a heavy sigh and a disappointed shrug, “You’re just not the same anymore.”

Thankfully, James clarified it for me. “You’ve grown. You’ve become better, you learned.” And honestly, I’d like to think I have. In fact, I appreciate being told I’ve grown (internally, of course, as I do believe my height is pretty permanent at this point), rather than being told I’ve changed. Having “changed” just seems so irreversible, as if I had left some good parts of me behind, thereby making me less “me.”

Being told I’ve grown, and truly feeling it, is more rewarding. It means there was room for me to improve, that someone saw that potential in me, and that I fulfilled it. In 525,600 minutes, I expanded my patience, worked and fought harder, became more daring, did and said more things I probably didn’t ever think I’d have the courage to do or say, and became able to more accurately identify where it is that I stand, what I stand for and what I will not tolerate. It’s strange, but it feels like two things have been happening at once: I’m meeting myself for the first time, but I’m also meeting an old friend that I hadn’t embraced in so long yet have known for ages. How’s that for feeling like I’ve been time travelling?

Of course I wasn’t just knowing myself. I was meeting and getting to know all sorts of people, too. A year ago I never would have thought that I’d meet a brilliant mathematician from Bahrain who’d help break me out of my shell and make adjusting to a new city just that much easier, or that we’d form a bond akin to adopted siblings (who get along, clearly, not the kind who hate each other’s guts). A year ago the idea of meeting an older brother figure in any place other than in Manila was ridiculous – people elsewhere would just be too different! – but I believe I’ve found a friend for life in a rather-culturally-hybrid-and-confused-yet-down-to-earth dude with whom I can be so brutally honest, and from whom I can expect the same kind of honesty in return. I’ve met girls for whom I expanded my sisterly concern, my older-sister instincts pushing me to want to see them be better, be happy.

I’ve met Italians who so graciously adopted me into their tightly-knit family and made me feel at home, an intelligent and creative soul who speaks the language of music with so much passion it’s sometimes intimidating, writers, filmmakers, readers, law students, account managers – it would be

impossible to really enumerate comprehensively. And just when I thought I’d seen ’em all, and had every possible conversation I could, life surprised me like it knew my mind still had that itch it still longed to scratch, knew that there were still parts of me that felt unengaged, and I made a good friend who helps expand my mind and constantly teaches me that there’s always a way to do things better, and that there’s always something I don’t know yet (as if my mind weren’t hungry enough).

As I write this down, I wonder why some people come to mind more fondly than others, and why their memory resonates (and hopefully continues to resonate) much more strongly in my life. I recall what I told my sister one time: “The cool thing about London is that you can stay in one place and all these people will be the ones coming and going. Everyone’s in transit.” But with everyone in transit, who sticks, and who doesn’t? Do I just chalk it all up to connection and chemistry?

Maybe connection and chemistry is part of the work. Connection and chemistry, I think, help identify

where a bridge would be good to put, where it could be sturdy and useful. But I think what really keeps it together are dreams. In the past year, I’ve found that the people I feel closest to are the ones who shared their dreams with me, and to whom I’ve confided my own dreams to. The more I know about their dreams, the more connected I felt, the more passionately I felt for their goals , the more sincerely I hoped to see them happy and successful. I felt more woven into their story, and they felt more woven into mine. Anyone could talk about last weekend’s party, and it’s fairly easy to talk about how  hectic everyone’s been with their exams. Trust me, it’s how I survived those elevator rides up and down my building. Knowing someone’s dream, however, and truly believing in it and in him/her, helps to make clear just how far people have come, how much further they have to go. The best part? From the very moment they tell me what it is they so desire out of life, I feel privy to this wonderful story that has yet to be told, and it feels, to me, a privilege to be able to see it unfold. It’s almost as if I, at the point of dream revelation, am transported into the future, where I suddenly become sure that this person has a place in my life, and that I have a place in his/hers, and that I will see dreams come true, even if the dreams won’t always stay the same.

Has it really been a year? Chronologically, yes. But in my retrospection, it feels a lifetime, and I am grateful. This gratitude is a good sign that tells me I’ve not yet tired of it, that I’ve more to learn from it, and that none of it was a waste. In the remaining weeks, I find I am letting home, family and friends envelope me in the familiarity that I will always hold dear, and at the same time I am taking deeper breaths and looking forward to returning to what’s become my second home.

Roughly 525,600 minutes of my life have been spent there, where laughter has echoed, smiles have been shared, hugs have been given, tears have been shed, grumbles of frustration let out, eyes widened in awe and in disbelief. It all leads me to realize that yes, I have been living there for the past year. But who says that makes it less of an adventure? I have always been under the impression that time travelling is an adventure indeed.

Quick Post: Lethal (Re)Actions

And here’s what’s come to my attention: that jumping to conclusions is perhaps more dangerous than anything else, especially when it concerns other people. What makes it worse is that the bigger you feel your conclusion is, the higher your jump, or maybe vice-versa: the higher your jump, the bigger you feel your conclusion is. Here is the danger: the bigger your conclusion that you jump to, the stronger the desire to tell someone else.

And then it just spreads like wildfire.

You tell someone else what “it sounded/seemed like,” and “sounded/seemed” gets lost in translation, and all the other person hears is “it was.” The whole idea of “benefit of the doubt” goes out the window – it jumps out just as you jump to a conclusion – regardless of the truth.

The only thing that can spare anyone from this catastrophe is the idea that you have forged a bond stronger than the conclusion that screwed things up. Without that, you find no reason to hear the truth. You feel you are right, and hold another guilty, as if whatever it was, was done with full intention. 

But I suppose, if you are ready to believe that, the bond wasn’t that strong to begin with. All that will be left after the wildfire of a conclusion is the ground in between that has been razed, and the smoke that will never seem to lift. And all that’s left to do is to get out and save yourself.

The Discomfort of Being Shown Gratitude

Why does gratitude make us feel uncomfortable? Have we become alien to the feeling that we have done something good for someone else? Maybe we’ve become accustomed to preferring that people return the favour instead. Or perhaps we are burdened by all our other flaws, that we think our good deeds are not out of charity, but a subconscious balancing of scales, of penance.

How often do we even hear people say “You’re welcome,” anymore? We say “No problem,” “Don’t worry about it,” “No worries.” Why? Are we afraid that people actually feel welcome to expect charity from us? Is it a way for us to ensure that they understand that we intended it to be an occasional occurrence? Maybe we like the idea of assuming that they think it was an inconvenience to us, but that we were so kind to have indulged them. So semantically we emphasise that it wasn’t a problem, that it wasn’t a cause for concern – it could’ve been for another individual, but not to us, because we are just that much more generous.

I long to be comfortable with being shown gratitude, not because I expect it, but because maybe it will make me more grateful in return. Accepting someone else’s gratitude switches a light on in me, showing me the way to choose to see the sincerity in an expression of thanks, and allowing me to be so humbled by it that I, in turn, become more comfortable with showing gratitude myself.

Paris est Arrivée à Manille!

I’m still kind of in awe at how far my love for anything French has come.

It started out as an interest, which led to a good use of foreign language units, which led to a minor in French Studies, which led to the development of interest to love without being limited to just the fact that so many great words have been spoken and written in and/or about France throughout history.

And now my Mom has opened a café so greatly influenced (infected?) by this love of mine. It’s so surreal how we’ve been able to bring to life bits and pieces of that which I love, even if just in a little corner of Manila’s suburbia.

One of the best parts is being able to SMELL Paris every morning, when they bring out the freshly baked breads and brew the coffee. And maybe being able to sit next to the Arc du Triomphe.

Independence Day Sentiments

*I wrote this just last June, on Independence Day. Decided to transfer it here, because it feels quite out of place on my Tumblr, which is more to indulge my (crazy, wild, unpredictable, weird) impulsive cravings and interests, not so much for my writing.

I have very mixed feelings about patriotism and nationalism. I suppose it depends on who carries it out, and the manner with which they express it. Some may be encouraging and inspiring, while others may end up just further alienating and “exclusive”-izing Filipino-ness.

In this day and age where diversity and individual identity are valued, to each his/her own. Let no one judge your nationalism and patriotism insufficient or excellent just because of language barriers and differences in ideals.

You are not any less patriotic because you speak a different language or do not speak the national language fluently. Nor are you more so because you speak it like a pro. Because the language you are most familiar is a matter of how you were raised, and patriotism is not always a matter of inheritance or descent. Your mouth may speak Filipino, but you may want anything else but.

Imposition can make a healthy breeding ground for intolerance – intolerance to people who are unwilling to subject themselves to your precise ideals.

So let each one develop their sense of patriotism and to what extent they wish to feel it. The fact that one wishes to acknowledge oneself as Filipino above any other nationality is a good sign in itself. Patriotism is developed, not imposed. An imposed patriotism is not patriotism, because it will always lack heart.

So Happy Independence Day to all of us Filipinos. Love your country, love your culture, and never be afraid or hesitant when you find yourselves loving and taking pride in it all more than you thought you would.

In Through the Mouth, Out Through the Pen?

While waiting for work to officially begin, I did my daily dose of surfing the net for something interesting. If there’s anything work has taught me during its downtime (which is usually the first two to three hours of my work hours), it’s that websites don’t actually get updated as frequently as I had hoped or thought. No new fashion or beauty trends on Style.com since I last checked the day before. Nothing noteworthy on JustJared, and Tumblr, in all its GIF and hi-res photo goodness, was too tedious to load on my work computer (a black PC running on Windows XP – quite frustrating, as I haven’t used Windows this thoroughly since I went Mac in 2006).

Yesterday, I decided to visit NYTimes. I quickly – very quickly – went through the news. Generally, Obama isn’t doing so well, I thought to myself. And then I moved on. Art and Culture. Books. I scanned through the Best Sellers – no surprise that “The Help” was No.1, with Emma Stone battling it out with Mila Kunis to be on top these days. “Game of Thrones” was somewhere on the list, also no surprise, although I’ve never tried watching it (if I’m missing out, please let me know, I may just look into it).

And then I saw this interesting illustration on one of the sidebars/menus:

I've never thought of what writers, whose words I eat up, ate on a regular basis. Was it a factor in their greatness?

I glanced at my floral lunch (or, because of my work hours, dinner) bag, and decided to take a peek inside. Sushi and chicken teppan from Red Kimono (a poor substitute for Omakase, honestly, but they had temporarily  closed the Omakase branch near our house for renovations). If someday people would ever be interested in what I ate to stay inspired and motivated to write and fulfill my dreams, I wouldn’t want it to be sushi. Chopsticks aren’t the best utensils to have when you want to multitask effectively – although that WOULD be unique and interesting.

I took a sip from my Starbucks tumbler that contained Twinings Earl Grey with some creamer. Yes, I believe I wouldn’t mind if Earl Grey tea were to ever be associated with me – but it kind of downplays my love for cafes and coffee and caffeine, I think. Might mislead people to think I could never handle a nice, big cup of cappuccino the way the French and Italians serve it.

I thought of all my favorite kinds of food (which ultimately means the food I tend to crave for when it’s that time of the month, and my stomach reveals it is bottomless): dimsum? Pasta? Risotto? Paella? Noodles? Cheesecake? Chicharon? Sisig? Grilled prawns? Crab? Gelato? Melon? Strawberries? Rasberries? Bananas? Peanut butter? Jelly? Peanut butter AND jelly? The list went on.

And then my stomach growled (much like it is now), and I realized I wasn’t really musing about the food I would someday be associated with. I was musing on what I wanted to eat at that very moment, because yes, it IS that time of the month. (As I am writing this, I find that I am still craving for everything I’ve mentioned above – and more.) I don’t think I’m quite ready for the permanence of just a single snack anyway – I’m sure there’s a whole lot more food to crave for that I just haven’t tried yet. YET.

Apparently It’s National Book Week

A friend and fellow Lit Major posted this on Facebook – it’s one of those gimmicks to promote people/places/events, like that time when everyone changed their profile picture to a photo of a cartoon from their childhood to promote awareness for cancer or something.

I’m already expecting that not a lot of people will catch on to this promo-trend, but what the heck.

It’s National Book Week. The rules: Grab the closest book to you. Go to page 56. Copy the 5th sentence as your status. Don’t mention the book.

It’s not the easiest quote to identify/relate to a book or author, but good luck, and Happy National Book Week!