The knowing is in the living

Last Friday, I spoke at the commencement ceremony of the University of the Philippine Diliman Extension Program in Pampanga and Olongapo. Here’s a much shorter version of what I had to say:

Ordinarily, on an occasion like this, I would have spoken to you about the topics I usually take up in my columns for The STAR – about how important it is to match intelligence with values, about the need to seek out the truth in this age of fake news and AI, about how deftly we should navigate the murky political waters ahead of us; in other words, about how we must develop a strong and clear moral core, whatever profession we choose, and live for the good of others.

Instead, today I will talk to you about time – yes, that fourth dimension which, according to science and philosophy, is really a function or a measure of change. Without change, there is no time.

Why time? Because it’s been on my mind a lot lately. Last January, I celebrated my 70th birthday and my 50th wedding anniversary with my wife June. To be sure, it hasn’t always been an easy life, but I can tell you what a huge surprise and relief it is to be here, alive and reasonably well, at 70.

For most of us, life has a fairly predictable plot, and it goes this way:

In your 20s you will want to know who you are, what you stand for. You will choose a course and a profession, get a job, dress up like an adult.

In your 30s you will think more seriously about companionship, maybe marriage, maybe children. You will want your heart to make up its dizzy mind and settle on someone, or get used to being alone.

In your 40s you will fret about finances, your position in your company, maybe have an affair, lose your faith and then again, if you’re lucky, maybe gain everything back.

In your 50s you will be expert at many things, sit on boards and manage this and that. You will begin to think about words like “stability,” “reputation” and “legacy.”

In your 60s your steps will become shorter and slower, and you will want comfort most of all – a soft bed, an easy chair, good food and wine – and indulge your bucket list.

In your 70s and 80s, you will just want and fight to be alive.

In your 90s, with most of your friends gone and with your eyesight and hearing going, you may well just want to be dead.

That’s the basic plot – but like time itself, it’s not a fixed one. Time is strangely flexible.

In my writing classes, I often say that a well-written story, even if it’s 20 pages long, feels like it ended too swiftly, but a badly written one, no matter how short, feels like forever. And we all know but don’t understand why happiness always seems to be fleeting, while grief and pain endure. That’s how time is bent by whatever we fill it up with – how it holds meaning, or loses it.

How will you fill up that space with change, and make your time worthwhile? What kind of story will your life be?

As one of my book titles go, “The Knowing Is in the Writing.” By this I mean that we writers think that we know our characters from the beginning – but in fact, we only really know them as we write about them, and subject them to the kind of intense pressure that life will bring to bear on each one of you.

In fiction and in playwriting, I often point out to my students that characters become most interesting when they go out of character – not whimsically, but out of dramatic necessity and inevitability, the kind of tortured inner logic that drives us to do things we never thought we could, in our imagination of ourselves as good people: to lie, to cheat, to steal, to support extrajudicial killing, to laugh at rape jokes and to think that someone who habitually lies and brings out the worst in people can be fit to be president. But conversely, that turn of character can also lead us to perform amazing acts of nobility and charity, of heroism.

In your case, the knowing will be in the living. You think you know yourself today, what you want, where you want to go and how to get there – and it’s important that even now, you have this game plan and this compass to lead you forward. But you will never know and discover your true self until your most vulnerable moment, at which your soul will be revealed in utter transparency.

For some of us, the sad truth is that life will be short. But that’s no reason to say it will be worth little, because you can still make it meaningful and memorable. Remember Achilles, who in the Iliad was given a choice of living a short but glorious life, as opposed to a long but boring one; he chose the former, and thereby became a legend.

But again, how your lives turn out will be your story to write, although you will have many co-authors, including the Divine. Some say life is predestined, which would make for bad fiction; I prefer to believe in at least the illusion of free will, of human agency, because then we and our fictional characters have moral responsibility.

Life will be a challenge, as soon as you step out of this campus into the world at large. But what I can tell you is that, with grit and a little luck, you will survive. To do that, you may have to learn to forgive yourself for your mistakes, to change your mind and to compromise if you must, because the ideal you will always be a work in progress. Whoever sits in Malacañang or the White House, you can still find ways to serve the people, for which you will and must survive. We survived martial law; you survived the pandemic.

So, again, how shall we fill up the time ahead of us? Of course we’re running on different clocks or even calendars. If your life is at brunch, mine has just been called to dinner. I don’t know about you, but I will have that dinner with my wife on the beach, with a glass of wine, imagining what it must be like over the deepening horizon.

That horizon will always be ahead of us. We think we are forging ahead into the future, but in fact, with every breath we take, we are becoming part of the past, of what happened, of what was.

There is an afterlife. In the very least, it is the life of those we leave behind. You will now be part of my afterlife. Through this speech, through my words, I will live in you.

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Email me at [email protected] and visit my blog at www.penmanila.ph.