Thoughts on going 46

Tomorrow, if the weather permits, I will be marking my forty and six summers in this war-prone, disease-stricken, poverty-ravaged Earth.

I will, if my stars don’t collide with each other—and if the Great Hand that hang them in the skies desires—still continue to be a witness to the beauty of God’s creation, notwithstanding the economic devastation wrought by the global financial crisis man-made by the Americans and the political confusion in my country aggravated by the idiotic and selfish ambitions of our purported leaders.

Birthdays, I suppose, however, are neutral and do not concern themselves with the politics or economic condition of the moment, but still, one cannot—and should not—withhold making known his views or comments about the general situation obtaining in his land of birth, particularly if that land is being torn apart by the dogs.

For this is what is happening in the land of which I am a citizen. One will say it may not be appropriate to make such an observation on the eve of one’s birthday, first, because such occasion generally should prompt a celebration; and second, one should ‘grow’ with age.

Fine.

However, this orthodox thinking could only be true in a normally perfect world. Alas, our world is a badly-bruised world, hurting from a self-inflicted wound that pesters every passing day, birthday or no birthday.

Also, in my lexicon, birthdays are quiet rather than celebratory moments. As to ‘growing’ with age, because of my experiences, the wide-eyed discoveries, and the daily battles I have to wage and fight as a human creation, I have only become acutely, sharply aware that my life—borrowed as it is—must be lived in a way that it serves a purpose.

That purpose has been quite well-defined from the time Fate decreed that I should be a writer.

I can’t tell when that decree was issued. Memory has many twists and turns. Hazy, like cigarette smoke: now in writing my uncomplaining companion together with a cup of coffee, another docile friend.

Was it thirty years ago when, in high school, I began to scribble verses of poetry to impress the young girls in my class? Or was it only when I discovered that words, properly appropriated, sing together to produce a coherent idea that serves to provoke a whole range of emotions?

I am not sure. What is certain is that even if no one thinks of my birthday, the world’s problems and such unresolved questions of injustice, poverty, war and nuclear proliferation, environmental destruction, and graft and corruption in high and low places, will still be here.

Here. With us. Our twin.

I have read someone said that the world’s greatest and minutest problems have already been solved, and that the burden is to find where those solutions are.

This burden fully occupies me today. It is the burden that every pedestrian has to bear everytime he inhales the fumes that pollute every street corner of our cities. The same burden that the next president, whoever she or he is, will realize to be bigger than his or her campaign promises—and ambition; a burden that every birthday celebrant discovers after blowing out the candle on the cake, after the last guest has left, and after the last of the cutlery is cleaned and kept for use in next year’s celebration.

Nervous by nature, I felt that time is closing in on us, the inhabitants of a temporary habitat, that soon if not sooner, we shall be made to account for the singular sin of allowing our planet to degenerate into an inhospitable place.

This thought is mortifying. And why is that? Why would one entertain the morbid idea, and on the eve of his birthday at that, that because of man’s folly, we may soon have no place to carry out our self-destructive play? That soon, we may never have birthday celebrations?

The signs are there. Whether it’s the sea tide now rising to occupy once-before dry land in Sibale, or the fickle weather, or the drug-induced rapes and murders, or the squabbling that marks our politics, the signs point to the direction we are heading: Exit.

This is the world we have on the eve of my birthday. So what?

Over breakfast on his 75th birthday, I asked the late Blas F. Ople, then a senator, what he felt about reaching such a ripe and productive age. He paused, sipped his coffee, inhaled deep a cigarette smoke, and said: “Nicon, I have no regrets at all. I think all my decisions in life at the time I made them were right”.

What quarrel can I—Ople’s disciple—have with that statement?

And so, I resolved there and then to make sure that regret, if ever I come to the point of doing such, will be on the context of having made a right decision.

Capturing in writing these personal thoughts on the eve of my birthday may be a vain but, to me, a right step.

There are light, happy moments, alright. Last Thursday, my nieces and a nephew surprised me with a serenade barely a full week before my birthday. The occasion was our family’s get-together which the wife planned and which we held at a hot spring somewhere in the bowels of Mt. Makiling.

My brothers and sisters, except Erel who had gone ahead to her Creator two years ago, were there. My father, now 72 and hurting from arthritis, and my mother, 71 and with failing eyesight, were of course the ‘why’ of the reunion and were there, at the center table, happy but in deep thoughts. My big family being Seventh-Day Adventists, they prepared a program of which the serenade to me was a part. It was captured on-cam.

I can’t count my blessings. But if I were to account for every gift I have received during my four-decades-and-counting of existence in this universe, I’d say that the gifts of life in the persons of Lara and Lilac, my two beautiful and intelligent daughters, would be the ones I will certainly—and hope to—freshly unwrap every waking hour and every morning as I prepare myself for my daily battles.

I now write solely for them, believing that through what I write, the earth would become a little better place to live.