WHAT I’VE LEARNED SO FAR

It’s my birthday week and that’s always depressing. I don’t know where I get this atrocious habit of assessing life around my birthday. It always gets me in a bad mood. So let me break all the rules and tell you from where I now reluctantly stand, what I think life’s been so far. Hence, the column title.

Life will not be what you expect it to be. It will not be what you plan or think you want. It will be something undreamed of and it will make you believe in destiny. When you’re in a good mood, watching destiny unfold can be exciting. Often, however, it unfolds too slowly or if it happens to be taking away something you wish to keep – youth, for example – destiny can make you really sungit. All I wanted was to meet Mr. Right, drive off into the sunset and live happily ever after. Knowing what life dealt me, I now find that dream very funny, reminds me of a Woody Allen quip, "If you want to make God laugh, tell him your future plans." It came true in snatches but didn’t stay. I think I forgot to include a forever clause in the fine print. Nevertheless, consequently, my life has been very interesting even for easily-bored me. I’ve done things I never thought I would do and I am so grateful that I was given the room, opportunity, courage and recklessness to explore avenues the fainthearted shun. So, while I didn’t get the life I wanted, I got much, much more.

In childhood, we learn. Then we become very beautiful/handsome and our hormones start to simmer, surge, come to a loud brisk hot boil. The fuel that sets our hormones going usually in our late teens into our twenties is stupidity – sometimes called idealism. We need this to get us into situations – marriage, pregnancy, affair, failed coup, jail, get kicked out of the house, disconnect from parents, get a life of our own. This situation will provide the basic shape for our future. We make choices at this time that we think we will never regret but we will regret them. How we live with that mistake or regret forms our character. Gloria Stefan sang it: "We seal our fate with the choices we make."

In our 30s, we are tested again, all of us, yes, you too as sure as I’m sitting here. Usually in our 30s decade we make a major mess. No life is spared these messes. Real life is slow and messy. It isn’t a movie. You don’t always look good. There is no soundtrack and most of the time the lighting is awful. How you pick up the pieces and sew them together again determines the shape and depth of the rest of your life. If you deny or postpone something you are meant to do, believe me it will haunt you and probably return later with twice the force and frustration. These things happen because you’re supposed to learn something and when destiny wants to teach you a lesson, it won’t stop until you’ve learned it. This is as true in a small individual life as it is in the life of a country.

In 1986 when democracy was restored and President Corazon Aquino took over the country, I kept waiting for her to punish the crimes of the Marcos regime – her husband’s assassination, graft and corruption that really got institutionalized during the Marcos years simply because they had absolute power and that corrupts absolutely, and the crimes committed during her regime – rebellions, coups d’etat. Nothing, everything swept under the carpet of forgiveness. I had difficulty with this stance. There must be punishment, I told whoever would listen, otherwise, people will not learn. They said I was un-Christian, unforgiving, unrelenting. Seventeen years later, what are we faced with? Twice as much corruption at least, escalating poverty that feeds terrorism, the same rebellion that throws the country into economic disorder, and a populace unclear on where the line draws between right and wrong. This inability to draw the line between right and wrong is so evident in the investigations conducted by our legislators that I ask out loud, Why did people vote for you?

Then life stabilizes as we get tired. Too tired to rock the boat, too tired to fight some more. We come to terms with our situation and its consequences. Time marches on kicking dust over our tracks. People forget. Life is crowded with parents, children, job, friends until they start to leave. Some migrate, others die, others marry and set up their own homes, their own families. After all the work, all the travails, all the pushing and pulling and patching together, you are alone. With time on your hands you revisit times of your life. You see your childhood in a different light. Now that you are their age, you understand your parents and grandparents better. You appreciate them more. You love them more and you wonder — is immortality staying alive in someone’s heart long after you are gone? Then you wonder — who will remember me?

You entertain other questions. What was the hardest thing I ever did? Was mothering harder than giving up smoking? How about learning to be fat? That’s hard still. Is that harder than learning to be old? You begin to spin philosophies about almost everything. You wax philosophical at the drop of a hat. And you start to think about death. I invented a novena for a quick, cheap death. I would like it soon.

Oh to be 70 again, wrote an octogenarian aunt. She made me wonder, if I could turn back time’s hands, what age would I like to be again? Strangely enough I would like to be a child again, go back to a time when I felt loved by all, indulged by all and nothing much was expected of me except that I please my grandmother, stay out of my mother’s way, and get good grades, which I did all the time. These were also the years when I could sit on my (surrogate) Daddy’s lap and bury my face in his fragrant clothes. I had no worries beyond who I would play with tomorrow since I was an only child.

But I can’t be a child again. In fact I am just getting older, getting ready to step into the circle of elders, talk about hypertension, and diabetes. Well, this is what I’ve learned so far. It doesn’t seem enough. It never is enough.

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E-mail lilypad@skyinet.net or visit www.lilypadlectures.com for writing classes. Comments welcome, too.