I have always loved writing. To me, having a blog was just for leisure, a way to breathe out all the stress in this world. I wrote a lot, posted a few and now I'm thinking, having been blessed with a great home-based job now, I know I would have more time for this past time of mine.
Everything that's happening to me now is a fresh start. Family, marriage, spirituality and work. I am very grateful that I have stumbled upon a job that has it all - great pay, perfect schedule and best of all, I never have to leave the house. Are these good enough reasons to ditch my once day job? Hell yeah!
Imagine not needing to put on make-up early in the morning and dress up in formal clothing with high heels everyday. Then I don't have to stay in the office late for unpaid overtime and worry about the pressure of sales for all departments even as you sleep. No more office politics to juggle with having too many bosses with different attitudes and company objectives in mind, everything now is virtual and very professional. To top it all, I don't need to be away for out-of-town trips and bear with Management Committee meetings for hours (this one time, our Business Plan meeting went on for 15hours straight). I could be just right here, in our home, the place where I should be when the kids go to school and when they come home after a day's class, I would be here to cook dinner for them. And while I do all that, I don't have to worry about my brain being stuck up (that's what we all women say when we argue why we choose to work instead of being a plain housewife, that we don't want our brains to lose its edge). This job gives me all the challenges I need to keep my mind going. I'd have time on Saturdays to do house chores, check on my kids' assignments and do more stuff and even enough time to go to church every Sunday.
A fresh start. A new chapter. This means new entries too for this blog. All those political views, stream of prose and nonsense thoughts buckled up in my head will now find their way to be posted. So today, I pondered. Cheers.
"He should sweep streets so well that all the host of heaven and earth will pause to say, 'Here lives a great street-sweeper who did his job well.'" -- Martin Luther King Jr.
Have you ever wondered what happened to your classmate in grade school who sang very much like Lea Salonga? Or have you ever tried flipping pages of your old yearbooks back in pre-school asking yourself if John the bully ever became the doctor he said he wanted to be? Have you salvaged your old high school paper of your graduation and reckoned if your valedictorian now has a Ph.D. degree in Biology? But perhaps we need not to look that far. Have we ever asked ourselves, did we become the person we once dreamed of becoming back as a child?
Well I have.
My yearbook in pre-school says I wanted to become a doctor someday to help save the sick and the poor. Only to find out that growing up I was never good at Biology and I often get scared of blood. Poof! There goes my ambition.
But that was just about my first dream. My second and stronger desire came in when I was finishing Grade school until early in my high school years. I wanted to become a journalist writing for a respectable publication. It was a long shot I told myself but not at all impossible. Besides, I know I have the skills. After all I was competing in writing competitions, national press cons and debates at that time. And as I finish my secondary education, this dream escalated to wanting to become the next Jessica Soho. I wanted to become a broadcaster. And back then when I was feeling all nationalistic, I envision myself fighting off bad apples in the government and advocating about human rights. Armed with that I became confident, ready even, to embrace this aspiration.
But then again I failed to realize that being a real journalist isn’t just about knowing grammar and memorizing the Journalist Creed but about being passionate, just, hardworking, responsible and brave. These are things you never learn academically. And these things never happen overnight. Reality is, even if I did come from a very good university, I won’t appear on camera the next day. You toil first into being an assistant or researcher for years before appearing on television. And even before you start as an employee, you need to face first the very stressful screening process of examinations and interviews. Add to that, you are competing against dozens of other hopefuls. These are people with the same dream as yours, who are also from reputable universities and some are even with cum laude tags on their resumes. And the best part of all is that there are only two positions open for all of you.
And so to cut the story short, I never became the broadcast journalist I once dreamed of becoming, I gave it up. Instead, I am now working for a car dealership of a well-known brand also hit by the global recession. I still write a few articles, a good stress–reliever for me, and post them here even if everyone else does it, even the ones who cuts and pastes someone else’s original write–ups, just to earn money through online adsense, kind of lucrative actually.
Now that I am working full-time as manager, I came to realize that even my day to day task is still about dreaming, though in management trainings we now call it vision - to envision an end and work on the means. The same is true in real life, we idealize on having a good living – nice house, stable job, happy family, quite easy to do actually, as easy as dreaming to be a doctor in Kindergarten, but the ways of achieving them is not at all simple.
We only have one life to live, and how we live it all starts with how we dream (visualize) ourselves to be. But more importantly, since we are the architects of our lives and all are conspired based on our experience, wants and needs, we can ask, who do we sell our brains to? That’s why in this world we live in we have jails for criminals (hopefully with a pack of corrupt officials being the worst of them) and monuments for heroes and saints. Our dreams dictate what role we want to play in society. And these roles, no matter how small or big, are what mold our humanity.
My grade school classmate who had that wonderful voice like Lea Salonga didn’t become a singer, although I’ve seen her before competing in singing contests on TV. I heard she went on to become a nurse. John the bully inherited their family’s business and became an entrepreneur. And our high school valedictorian hasn’t earned her Ph.D. yet and I don't think she ever would.
As for me, I dreamed to be a journalist and I’m selling my brain now to Chinese businessmen to sell cars. Though this blog allows me to be the so-called writer/journalist I wanted to be.
Finally, like me, you may have dreamed of being this somebody when you were young and turned out to be someone else. There’s always time – time to finally ask myself, what could have happened if I did get that journalism job at first…
What could have been if we all pushed on with dreaming and worked to achieve it? What then happens to society when all roles are played with passion and with zeal? When brains are sold according to innocent and simple wants? What then.
What's so amazing about this life is the wonder of waking up each morning, thinking ahead as to how your day would go and eventually be robbed of your amusement at the end of the day. The question blissfully starts with "What should I do?" and haplessly ends with "What have I done?".
But no matter how painful you look back at the perplexity of the situation, you can never hide the confoundness in you. And the more you shun your deliberate act, the more it will haunt you with the ones involved. It will overshadow you until such time you can no longer breathe and die with it.
You are now through with living in the past. You are now on your quest to speculate on the one constant thing we have in existence - change. Is it unfair to ask someone for tomorrow when the only thing of value to him is yesterday? Perhaps. But only fools would be daring enough to ask that.
The hell in living in solitude when at stake is your indifference. Unless he starts to truly value your worth then you'd rather live this life alone but in profoundness.
People don't die with the memory of what they have done in their past, but pass away with the remembrance of what they have done before they expire. True enough that history is meant to be remembered, but no history was ever conceived without a present and a future. Hence, you would rather have your subsistence worthwhile today and tomorrow. For just like any other yesterday, they would also pass.
Tomorrow, you shall no longer start your day with asking questions and be baffled but rather start it in waiting. Until that twilight, that state which separates your day with your night, would come to numb and take you in.
Sarili ang kaniig sa bawat panahong nagnanasa ng katipan Ang panahon ng paghanap sa anuman ay lalong kawalan Ninanamnam ang apdo, latigong sa katawa'y pumipilipit Ngunit sapat na ang sarili upang makapalitang hinga at init
Sarili ang kasuyo tuwing hinahangad abutin ang kasukdulan Pawis ay patuloy ang patak ka-ritmo ng ulan Hinahagkan bawat saglit ng lubusang pag-iisa Kasama ang sariling sarili at wala nang iba
Sarili ang kahingahan, sarili ang kalapit Sarili ang kaisa, sarili ang kapalit Sarili ang kaulayaw, sarili ang kasandig Sarili ang kasayaw, sarili ang kapintig
Sarili ang pag-iral at sarili ang pagtatapos Sa pagmulat ay sarili, sa sarili'y pagraos
Gaano kaya kasinsin ang pagkakaayos ng isang munting tinig, sa kabila ng dagok ng entabladong nagbigay sa iyo ng malaking puwang at ng madlang pinaingay ng katahimikan? Ganito bumulong ng walang mikropono sa entablado; Buksan lahat ng kalye mula sa iyong mga mata patungo sa mata ng madla at doo'y padagsain ng matulin ang nagsisimbalayang ingay ng mga sasakyan nito. Padaluyin ang sabik na sabik mong dugo na gugulantang sa iyong katawan at kakain sa laki ng entablado. Ngayon mo basagin ang ingay ng katahimikan. Sa buo mong paggalaw unti-unti ang bumulong sa pagsang-ayon ng iyong damdamin. kubkubin mo ng buong tapang ang mga tengang walang laman, at patayuin ang iyong tinig sa tore ng pagkamulat... ...hanggang mabingi ang madla sa ingay ng ibinulong mong katotohanan.
