Bliss
They say there’s no better time to start finding your bliss than the very moment it occurs to you that it’s something you need to do. For people like me who need a little ceremony, the New Year comes a close second.
A few years ago, when some of my closest friends and I lived close to each other in what we called the Single Girls’ Strip, a.k.a. Boni Avenue to Pioneer Street, we made an annual ritual of putting our dreams into visualization drawings on paper. The idea was to draw our future lives on a single sheet, write rah-rah-you-go-girl words of support on the back of each other’s drawings, and put them up where we would see them every day so that we wouldn’t lose sight of our goals. I stuck mine beside the mirror over the bathroom sink, and as each year fell away, I folded each drawing and deposited them into a shoebox for no other reason other than because I’m a sentimental pack rat.
Two days ago, while cleaning my apartment in preparation for the official fresh start that midnight of December 31st provides, I found, among the mountains of accumulated papers, the first drawing I made with my friends — using the brown paper placemats of a long-gone ‘80s-inspired bar in Ortigas. It was small and dark and decorated with framed photographs of movie icons from more than a decade before. The visualization exercise was M’s idea, and because M gets everything she focuses on (it’s almost freaky actually), there were no cynics in the house that night. We made our drawings over drinks with John Cusack holding up a boombox from The Sure Thing as our witness. We’ve all since left The Strip — M now lives in a nearby Asian country, A made a leap of faith by transplanting herself to a foreign land several time zones away with an entirely different language and is now Le Martha Stewart of her quaint town, as of last contact, L is in the throes of yet another interracial true love affair. Just like in the drawings.
Year after year, my drawings have more or less been the same — littered with the standard big, fat, red hearts, airplanes, an island with two coconut trees and a hammock in between (with a stick-figure girl who is supposed to be me, but the physical similarities are a bit of stretch), dollar and peso signs, a yacht (while we’re at it, right?), a little chapel (only because it’s fairly easy to draw). A large part of the drawing has come true, except for one thing: a rather colorful representation of bliss that has persisted throughout all the yearly drawings.
The world has a strange way of forcing you to face up to the things you need to do, and as if to make sure I don’t sit on my ass just drawing what would make me happy, it has sent me an ex-Stripper (just to be very clear, someone who used to live in the Strip). In town for the holidays, M met up with me for breakfast and bliss talk. Between jet-setting, writing, and glamming up for a living, and a rather eventful life outside work that appears busier than work, M appears to be shuttling through her days with the speed with the Tasmanian devil — on speed. How she manages to look pulled together is might prove to be a puzzle for physicists, and just completely beyond me.
But over breakfast, M admitted to contemplating moving on to the next phase in her life. “I don’t want to get stuck doing what I do because I know how to do it, I’ve been doing it a long time and I’ve been told I’m good at it,” she says, who which I did my very best Stanley Tucci and replied, “A million girls would kill for your job.” Still, she seemed resolute in gearing up for a new challenge, and her wide-eyed exuberance was nothing short of awe-inspiring. There is always the temptation to not rock the boat when you’re smooth sailing, even if the wind has died.
“Every time I look at a person, the first thing that comes to mind is how much better she’d look with a slight tweeze or a major wax job,” M went on. “And that’s not how I want to see the world.” She’s not entirely unhappy with her largely glamorous job, but if it’s not bliss, it’s really just second best.
Her new thing, meanwhile, is not entirely new — she has, over the years, nurtured a kind of altruistic tendency to mend broken spirits that it has earned her the rep of being the go-to girl for bluesy types or those whose self-esteem needs a reassuring boost. It’s something that has always made her happy, and having immersed herself in transcendent methods of physical therapy, she now mends both mind and body. She calls it her next career, some people might call it a calling, and hopefully, in the end, it will be her bliss.
And there’s nothing as inspiring as seeing other people set off on a journey that is exciting not for its destination but simply for being what it is — a journey. The very act of gathering one’s strength, I suppose, to jumpstart the pursuit of personal happiness is already half the joy. The other half is what you make of the whole exercise.
