Month: January 2018

The daily grind

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When I was growing up I always wondered why my father had to wake up so early in the day. He’d be up at 430am to get ready to go to work. By the time I was going to school, I’d usually hitch a ride with my dad. He’d drop me off and most of the days, he’d also pick me up after classes on the way home.

It was his daily grind.

And he’d always say, “I owe I owe so off to work I go.”

We don’t realize what most parents go through to place food on the table, send their kids to school, put a roof over their head, worry about the clothes on their backs while chasing their dreams.

Back then when the internet and the technological revolution was still intangible, the daily grind was a much slower process. It was like watching life evolve in slow motion.

Friends were actual people who played with and shared your most intimate and despicable moments with. They made you cry, laugh, and love at different phases in your life.

And then there was work. Not being subservient to the Internet had its pros and cons. (And that’s another topic altogether). The upside was that the skills I developed as a clinician was truly one that I would treasure. My generation, was the last of the dinosaurs.

Fast forward to today, I’d say that I’ve almost come full circle. Slowing down has crossed my mind gazillion times. The adrenaline rush of work and anxiety is a rollercoaster ride that’s taking a toll on my daily grind. And the years have made me gradually feel the aftermath.

And I remember my dad. He passed away at an early age of 59. I miss him a lot. Especially those moments spent with him. Because he was too busy providing, he eventually suffered two strokes and passed away. Too soon.

As we venture into another year, it’s time to reflect on whether I will let the daily grind affect the moments in my life that I will miss.

Remember, there is never a rewind button in our lives. If we let the daily grind miss out on what is essential, we would have life pass us by.

Sometimes you will never know the value of a moment until it becomes a memory. – Dr Seuss

The stories of their lives…#ICanSeeYourVoice

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Saturdays and Sundays on Channel 2 (ABS-CBN).

I’m not sure if a lot of you watch this show. It’s entertaining. It’s amusing. It’s a feel good mystery game show.

The mechanics are:

A guest artist singer who has to guess from 6 contestants who is a singer or who is “sing-tunado” (out of tune). All contestants have a pseudonym.

During the first round, the 6 “singers” provided a photo and short “biographical” sketch to convince the guest singer to pick him or her in the final duet with the singing star. The guest picks who he/she thinks is not a singer. One is eliminated.

In the second round, the remaining 5 lip sync. Guest this time picks 2 who he/she thinks is not a singer. Two are eliminated.

The third round shows more photos and longer biographical sketches of the 3 remaining contestants. Guest eliminates one who he/she thinks is not a singer.

Final round has two left and guest singer has to pick who between the two would he/she believes is the singer. The one not picked “sings” a final song and is eliminated.

The guest singer then does a “duet” with whom he/she picked as the winner. Is the winner a singer or not? You’ll know during the duet.

While the mechanics look simple, the show is actually an entertaining and heart moving one. The six contestants come from all walks of life. Some of them have actually beautiful voices while the others are just kibitzers. Whether they can or can’t sing is not the story of the show. After each contestant is eliminated, their life story is told. Their reason for joining the show is unfolds.

I follow the show not because of the entertainment it provides. It’s not like the slapstick noontime shows like Eat Bulaga that degrade the contestants. This is a wholesome show that elevates the values and reveals the struggles and lives of every ordinary Filipino.

There are even times when it’s host Luis Manzano provides not only comfort but assistance to the contestant after hearing their life stories.

If there’s a show that one should follow, this is one of them. You get to smile, laugh, and appreciate your lives a bit more after the show.

After all, these contestants share with us life’s relative joy.

3 weddings and 7 funerals

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That’s the number of celebrations of life…and death of friends in 2017.

The beginning of 2018 marked the passing of the mom of a colleague. A depressing and somber mood to greet new beginnings.

I recall the story of the conversation between life and death.

Life asked death, why do people love me but hate you?

Death responded, because you are a beautiful lie and I’m a painful truth.

The cycle of life, and sadly, death, begins as soon as one is born. The older one lives in society, the more celebrations of life and death one encounters. Time has a way of showing us who and what matters in life. It also reminds us of joy of beginnings and the pains in letting go.

We all want happy moments. It is human nature to expect that. To most of us, celebrations are made up of these happy days – birthdays, anniversaries, special occasions, marriages, Christmases. Moments where “gift giving” is an obligatory event. Most of us avoid discussing death as a celebration.

I’d like to think that death, as dreary and morbid as he may seem is an obligatory event that’s worth celebrating. It provides us the opportunity to remember all the good and bad journeys of the person. It provides closure to life, no matter how short or how long it is shared with others. No matter how difficult or comfortable life was, death will always be the final book that the person wrote in his lifetime.

Albert Camus once said “there is a life and there is a death, and there are beauty and melancholy between.”

Chasing choices

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A universal paradox is “you’re free to choose but you’re not free from the consequences of your choice.”

Between work and family, there are days when it’s really difficult to do a balancing act with our lives. You know how you have those days where your boss suddenly out of nowhere calls for a meeting pronto, but it’s the same time as your daughter’s ballet recital or son’s basketball game – and you have the tug-of-war decision to either put food on the table or keep a promise to your children.

We’re living in different times that make choices in life a challenging one.

Whether it’s the food you eat (organic or fast food) or the friends we make or the company we keep or the places we explore…the choices are vast and ours to make.

The abundance of choices provides us the profound freedom to explore and to do what we want. And this freedom, while at times abused, provides us the happiness to revel in the choices and consequences of such choice.

Someone once said that there are three C’s in our lives that matter. Choice, chance and change.

“You must make the choice, to take the chance, if you want anything in life to change.”

Everyday is a new day that provides us an opportunity to reflect on the choices, the chances and yes, the changes we want in our lives.

And don’t feel bad about making decisions that may not be popular or even upset others. Remember: you’re not responsible for their happiness. Only your own.

Make the choice today.

In search for inner peace

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Learning to ignore things is one of the great paths to inner peace.

Some days are pure joy. And then there are those that just stressful. But life’s like that. No one ever said that life is a bed of roses!

The Dalai Lama tells us not to let the behavior of others destroy our inner peace. Of course, it’s easier said than done. When you think that you’re just having a great day, someone or some incident comes along to break up the party.

But life’s like that! I’ve always said that the anatomy of disappointments are expectations. While it is good that we think positive and expect the best out of our efforts, there are just some circumstances that don’t make all things turn out the way we desire.

I’ve had some humbling moments. Moments when all along my wishes and dreams were a straight path, the outcomes don’t turn out the way I wanted.

But what we want planned doesn’t end up the way we want. Seriously, we end up where we are because at some crossroad in our life when we needed to make a choice we ended up making a decision and arriving at where we are. How we handle where we end up is how we face our inner fears or inner peace.

Inner peace is a difficult process to achieve. But not impossible. Every event can be taken as a glass half full or half empty. Finding a silver lining even in our worst days is the goal to achieving inner peace.

Remember – things happen for a purpose. That’s why I believe that even joy is relative.

What we give to the universe is what the universe gives back to us.

Be the reason someone believes in the good of people and inner peace will be good karma to all who believe.

Illusion of knowledge and propaganda

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I told some friends the other day, that it’s more difficult to write a story with a lie than using the truth. One has to be a prolific fictional writer in order to build one lie after another in order to sell a story.

Steve Hawking once said that “the greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is illusion of knowledge“.

It is sad that in this day and age of social media and technology, there are scumbags who utilise the gullibility of a few (?) in media in order to sell a propaganda.

When someone lacks the knowledge to run a company or an agency, and utilises the illusion of knowledge through fake press releases via paid columnists or paid trolls who feign intelligence in order to keep his job, you know the company is in deep shit. That’s because the “artificial intelligence” was sold to a bunch of idiots who never even checked the facts. To the reader, the lie was enough. The story was believable. And everyone was happy.

And then there are the peddlers. They disseminate the already wrong information and make it more complicated than it already is. These are the pushers of bad news. It’s disproportionate to the level of complexity (or simplicity) and is used to gather a lynch mob scenario in the propaganda. The peddler is the enabler for confusion and hate. They serve no other purpose in life but to collaborate with the propagandist to achieve fame.

Collateral damage is not important to them. After all, they are needy people. Need attention. Need likes on FB or social media. Need the entitlement. They are deceptive and make friends with the most culpable. They disguise themselves as helping or working for a cause, when in actuality they do this to gain a following (a petty pathetic following at that).

They are perfect examples of what illusion of knowledge is. They parade their accomplishments in public because it affirms their illusion.

These are the most dangerous kind of people. Every move made has a hidden agenda. Their deviousness is their skill. And manipulating people is their way of life.

And the gullible follower?

Well, there’s a Chinese proverb that describes them best – no greater fool than the fool that was fooled by a fool.

Being kind or being right?

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Mark Twain once said “kindness is the language that the deaf can hear and the blind can see”.

We’ve all had that moment when we decide on a matter that affects another person. It’s a difficult decision especially when it comes to work. Rules and regulations define what one needs to do. Or not do.

Often times things happen beyond our control. We can’t predict what happens in other people’s lives. An illness that debilitates a close family member, a family or someone who goes through difficult times, or worse, a death that leaves us devastated.

In the workplace, life goes on regardless of the circumstances. Upper management would always tell you to leave your problems at home. But how do you work well if issues at home hound your mind while you’re working?

In a relationship, at times we have difficulty sharing problems. Either others wouldn’t care or are looking out for themselves. It’s depressing to face your problems alone. After all, one is a lonely number.

Of course one can argue that people abuse kindness. But let’s keep it real and let karma pay back these low life creatures.

So here’s the rub. When is kindness more important than being right?

It’s a fair reminder that when people think that in the middle of their chaos, there was you to lean on, being kind will always be the right thing to do.

Kindness, after all, is an eight letter word that’s someone else’s Relative Joy.

Not today, f*cker

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And yes I curse.

It’s part of my nature. And yours as well. Well, yeah. We can argue that we should choose more “appropriate” words. True. But there will be days that I (or you) won’t give a fuck.

If there’s one book I’d encourage everyone to get, it’s “The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck” by Mark Manson. It’s not your everyday feel good, be nice kind of book. It’s an in-your-face book that makes you look at life the way we should.

I enjoyed the description of entitled people. The kind of people I loathe. Mason describes fictionally, Jimmy, an entitled SOB. “Jimmy…feels as though he deserves good things without actually earning them. He believes he should be able to be rich without actually working for it. He believes he should be liked and well-connected without actually helping anyone. He believes he should have an amazing lifestyle without actually sacrificing anything.”

“People like Jimmy become so fixated on feeling good about themselves that they manage to delude themselves into believing that they are accomplishing great things even when they’re not…”

“Entitled people exude a delusional degree of self-confidence…but the problem with entitlement is that it makes people need to feel good about themselves all the time, even at the expense of those around them. And because entitled people always need to feel good about themselves, they end up spending most of their time thinking about themselves. After all, it takes a lot of energy and work to convince yourself that your shit doesn’t stink, especially when you’ve been living in a toilet.”

“…People who feel entitled view every occurrence in their life as either an affirmation of, or a threat to, their own greatness. If something good happens to them, it’s because of some amazing feat they accomplished. If something bad happens to them, it’s because somebody is jealous and trying to bring them down a notch. People who are entitled delude themselves into whatever feeds their sense of superiority. They keep their mental facade standing at all costs, even if it sometimes requires being physically or emotionally abusive to those around them.”

Entitled is not happiness.

Today, learn to say NO to those feeling entitled around you.

You’ll do yourself and others a favor in making the world a better place by saying f*ck sh*t to them.

I’m smiling, but you’re not the reason anymore

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If you’re searching for a reason to leave, stop. The search is a reason.

I recall when we were growing up, we thought of the New Year as an opportune time to make changes in our lives.

A little drama here and there. A few promises and swears. I promise you, it’s the first few days or weeks of the year that you see some “magical change” in some people.

Old habits are just hard to break. And the cycle (well more or less) begins again. Promises, after all, are made to be broken.

So here’s my take on resolutions.

First, it’s got to be something you promise yourself because you know that it’s doable. No matter how painful, it needs to get done. Searching for a reason is a sign.

Second, is it’s a priority. If you had to choose between a fucked up love life or relationship, a shitty job that’s too painful to even wake up to, or a weird family to contend with each day, which would be the least of all evil to deal with? I’m not telling you which you should choose. It’s your life after all.

Third, and oddly I’d give advise, is you’ve got to balance which ones you can fix and which ones are not repairable. There are those that diplomacy or a bit of tact can solve. Then there are, after all, lost causes. Doesn’t matter whether you conjure the devil, it’s just hell having to contend with it day in and day out. It’s true when they say, misery loves company.

Finally, it’s just honor and pride in the end. You know the feeling of being treated like dirt shit? Well, been there and done that. You need to walk away from these situations. They’re deadly and they’ll leave you stressed and hating yourself.

Fair reminder. The more days you waste resolving these issues, the more regretful you become with yourself for not making decisions sooner. Procrastinating the inevitable is shit thrown at you and you liking it.

I’m making my resolution. I’m going to smile again. And yes, it’s not because of you.

Finding Happy

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Sometimes your heart needs more time to accept what your mind already knows.

We all want to be happy.

Here’s the catch.  The world isn’t kind enough to grant this wish all the time.

Take the parents who’ve wanted a child for the last ten years.  After so many attempts, they finally have a baby, only to discover that he has congenital birth defects.  No matter what the quality of life of this child will be, or how short-lived it is, there is no doubt that both parents and child will share that relative joy.

Or the husband and wife or boyfriend and girlfriend or lifetime partners who are going through confusing times need to resolve their relationship issues.  Being unhappy in a relationship that attempts to struggle at staying together because one does not want to hurt another one’s feelings is unfair for both parties.

People are miserable by nature. It doesn’t take a lot to make someone happy.  The poor store clerk who stole a can of canned good because he was hungry, the old woman who begs at the doorstep of the church to buy medicines for an ailing husband, the rich teenager who seems to have every material thing he could want for but has parents who are separated and feels unloved, the beautiful actress who is popular and yet is suffering from cancer. Yes, we are all miserable by nature.  But finding happiness is our purpose in life.

Finding happy starts with our disposition.  We all have crosses to bear. They are of equal magnitude.  Only the circumstances differ. Until we’ve felt hunger like the boy or heartache like the woman whose whole family suffered a catastrophic demise, or unloved and lonely in this world, we really won’t know what it feels like to be happy.

I am not an inspirational writer. And I am not writing this to give you advice. I’m writing this to make you realise that we all have challenges in our lives. It’s normal to be angry, go into denial, bargain with God or the devil, then finally accept our fate.

Learn to accept what the mind already knows. The heart will adapt. No matter how painful it takes to be happy.