Such is Life

Right now, I just feel like I want to strip myself off of all the inauthentic layers that have drowned me and kept my core in the dark, temporarily but seriously blinded me to sulkiness.

I share the same notion on getting older as Maria Ressa’s,“Too often, as we get older, we stop really looking, stop really listening, stop living in the moment.” She continues, “We get in the car. We drive to work. We barely look at the people we run into. We’re barely alive because we’re thinking of future tasks and future deadlines.” Here she was broaching apropos her blog - ‘Living in the Moment’.

I, by fortunate chance, grew up in a small city in a province, Naga city. Though considered as city, the fresh air we desire most on every nature escapade can be breathed there. It was once a simple, happy place where the hustle-bustles of a city life is but ironically strange. Though called a city, I was still labeled as probinsyana when I first set foot on Manila where the true level of a city life is defined. And now finally I am in Dubai, this is not just a total experience of busy streets and dizzying shoot ups of skyscrapers but a whole new world of strangers. The dramatic movement and brave attempts to fulfill the popular cosmopolitan dream were quite apparent and obvious.

I remember the conquests that I’ve been through to achieve this stage that even as a probinsyana kid I never thought I’d reach. Although dreaming never stopped and I believe that was the major push to its realization. Such is life, I thought, when we try harder to leave a place getting-too-familiar, as that would define our progress in life in a matter of change while casting-off over time. I did not just see the differences and sudden changes with my own eyes but, by way of necessary stubbornness, felt them brushing me off or spurn me to the ground. It came to my light that the world isn’t so kind after all and getting more unkind than ever.

The fight to tear through modernization went on. There was no giving up, not until I break the code to my success. As a Filipina, most of my actions in order to traverse on towards one goal were at times deemed kapit sa patalim. Such is life, I re-thought.

Then I became very busy. It was a given fact that every progress comes with great responsibility that would, phase by phase, eat off your time – your self-moments, that is. Then you’ll find out, out of the blue (like as if it was never there), that things are no longer the same. They are in fact disgustingly different that the yearning for being back to the probinsya, in order to recreate ‘different’ into ‘same’, becomes expensive when it once was free. This, I believe, is becoming more and more common to the populace consisting mostly of yuppies. The threat of psychological disturbance starts to breeze in.

Then we sulk, get depressed, angry and irritable. Blaming it all to the outside forces. We wish we never tried reaching this path, making this pact or taking responsibility. We go back in time and cast a longing lingering look behind wishing that we should never have left a halcyon place for a monstrous city. As they always say, regrets never come first.

We stopped living every moment as they become too familiar as routine. So sad.

At times the peeling off of unnecessary layers, trapping the fundamental nature of existence, is uncomfortable as we see the place where we started like as if it has become a strange place altogether.

Allow me to quote him too, TS Eliot: “We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.”

I concede that at this point in time I got acquainted with anxiousness, and I am talking about a daily routine anxiety. 45 days before I reach 30 years of age I began to feel the need for retirement alongside nature with nothing else but food and clothes. Back to basics, that is. I would kill to breathe that air.

I am confident that soon enough, when the time is right, I’d find my way back to the place where I started and begin a life I never thought was the dream I’ve always blueprinted in mind.

Soon...