The Great Wave

Let me tell you about three postcards hanging on my refrigerator:

• One is of a cat against an Angkor Wat temple– Athena gave to me from her trip to Cambodia. She knows I love cats and postcards.
• Another one is a riff on Gustav Klimt’s The Kiss, where the man and woman are wearing traditional hanbok– a cute souvenir from Seoul
• The last one shows The Great Wave of Kanagawa, which has always deeply resonated with me.

In the distance is a snow-capped mountain. But between you and the mountain is a turbulent sea. A giant wave dominates the page, and its foam are shaped like claws.  A couple of boats are forced into the curvature of the waves. The people on them are hunkered down.

It has always meant for me: meaninglessness and persistence.

It has always encapsulated Father David’s lecture on Nietzsche nearly a decade ago: how we are thrown into a sea of disorder and how we must always try to make sense and build our rafts. The waves are unrelenting and will smash our boats, nevertheless we must keep afloat and string the pieces together.

There is no inherent meaning in life or living. There are no set of instructions, nor a pre-destined way that we have to be. Without asking for it, we are born into a world of flux and movement. Joys and suffering, apart from them as consequences of our actions and ways of living, are largely a function of chance– things greater than ourselves. Things just happen to us.

And so the work of constructing meaning weighs on our shoulders. We need to keep building our rafts so as not to be consumed by the radical futility of everything or the aches that are randomly dragged into our doorsteps.

This is the problem of pain. Moments of joy and happiness carry us warmly downstream; they invite us to nap and to enjoy the sunshine. They don’t birth questions like: Why? 

We construct visions of how the world works from the vantage of our own backyards, to explain the pains that plague us or to have a reason to get out of bed in the mornings. Sense-making is when we cast our hopes outside of ourselves. It’s way that we hold to each other– everyone, equally fragile and impermanent–  to justify our continued existing in a world that is just so casual about meting out its cruelties.

It matters to believe the darkness is but a temporary prelude to warm, lasting light or to believe that this blindness has given sight to others. Whether or not it is true is another matter altogether.

But sometimes, just sometimes, don’t you just want to let the waves consume you?

Jarfuls of river water

My room is a haze of dust. For days, I’ve been unboxing, boxing, sweeping, sorting, chucking things. What I’d donate. What I’d give to my niece and nephews. What I’d take to fresh life in another country. The work has been a material review of the past decade.
Very few people have been invited to my condo in recent years. It had been messy and the frequent victim of my go-to defense mechanism against anything painful, upsetting, or difficult: “I’ll sort that out, eventually.” The layers of things, dust, mementos reveal my complicated relationship with space. In an old blog, I wrote about my fears of owning my own place: that it would be some sort of final determination of my identity. Is it the gloriously designed, sun-lit place I imagined it would be? No. But I was right– it was me.

It’s lived and occasionally abandoned, with calcified fossils of the parts of me in the past decade. Wads of Japanese origami paper. A thick binding of the music and lyrics of Jesus Christ Superstar. Tarot cards. Bookmarks from Oli’s trip to Europe. Notebooks with only the first few pages filled out. My friends’ org registration forms. Half-full packets of lettuce seeds and tomatoes. A facemask from the 2013 Korea trip.

Things were indiscriminately dumped in corners because they were artifacts of possibilities of myself I didn’t want to let go. I’ll do that later. I always thought I had all the time in the world to do everything I liked. That was youthful nonchalance and bravado. My work is a relentless deliberation of who I am now and what I choose to be. For which things would I set aside a parcel of my “one wild and precious life.”

Part of me feels frustrated that I didn’t just throw away things. That’s the same part that wishes we could all just move forward, onward. It wishes we could glide through life without any hitches or snags, and that growth is linear and the slope depends only on our self-determined tenacity. We are able to integrate so fully that nothing falls by the wayside. We can throw away old journals because we’ve learned everything we absolutely can.

But it doesn’t work that way. A mentor said that growth moves as a spiral: we circle back into the same issues and experiences but each iteration invites us to go deeper. And then there’s a nostalgic delight in revisiting these old nooks. I’m sifting through yellowed readings, journals, planners– and the sundry bits stuck on pages. Many of them are stained with dried rain, tracing cragged shorelines. I’m given little time machines to revisit old lessons and old selves:

On my college notes, I stuck a post-it where I wrote indignantly about a tricycle ride to school one day in 2008. A corrupt cop flagged my tricycle driver over some trumped-up charge, demanded payment, and took a day’s wage. When we got to school, I emptied my wallet and gave the driver all of my 250 pesos.

A copy of “Courtly Love,” which Mam Sol lent me with the pregnant expectation that I’d stick around in the academe and move to the IS department.

Doodles on my class notes. Resolutions to lose weight.

Postcards from all over. The delightful little missives friends left on gifts. The best poster I’ve ever designed for a feminism seminar in which I also spoke.

Tickets to museum trips. Boarding passes. City maps.

Oli’s tottering, teetering, friendly gifts and letters and then his valentine’s cards.

What’s so worthy of keeping these specks, when they’re so insignificant they’re forgotten by the very person who’s lived through them? In the vastness of life, universe, and time, what does it matter? I suppose it’s these ephemeral little moments that makeup life. And while the mess is frustrating, I’m somehow grateful for the residues.

Some time ago, I’ve decided to become a bit more minimalist. I’m lucky I’m getting the chance. I learned: everything you own demands your attention. Every item draws you to certain direction– a Linda Howard novel asks you to be the person who spends a bit of time to indulge in romantic tropes, a box of watercolor asks you to dabble a bit, a jar of creme asks you to be the kind to your skin. And everything eventually inquires after its own ending. Every single thing you have, you will have to think about again. I’ve learned that time and attention is more expensive than money.

There has to be a sweet spot somewhere: to be light and spry enough to sprint into the future and to be grounded and meditative enough with my jarfuls of river water. It’s the still waters that can best tell the story of movement.

And sometimes, it bears reminding: these are the good days we’ll someday reminisce about.

Everything is Waiting for You

Everything is Waiting for you
David Whyte

Your great mistake is to act the drama
as if you were alone. As if life
were a progressive and cunning crime
with no witness to the tiny hidden
transgressions. To feel abandoned is to deny
the intimacy of your surroundings. Surely,
even you, at times, have felt the grand array;
the swelling presence, and the chorus, crowding
out your solo voice. You must note
the way the soap dish enables you,
or the window latch grants you freedom.
Alertness is the hidden discipline of familiarity.
The stairs are your mentor of things
to come, the doors have always been there
to frighten you and invite you,
and the tiny speaker in the phone
is your dream-ladder to divinity.
Put down the weight of your aloneness and ease into the
conversation. The kettle is singing
even as it pours you a drink, the cooking pots
have left their arrogant aloofness and
seen the good in you at last. All the birds
and creatures of the world are unutterably
themselves. Everything is waiting for you.

To the mountains

The ending has been set: July 12 is my last day of work. I’m excited for the space it will open up, for the things the gust will blow inside once the door opens.

I’ll spend time with Oliver. I’ll start chipping away at the tower of guilt, the books I’ve been intending to read. I can watch the series and movies I want to watch, take my online courses, listen to podcasts. I can write! Take walks and push myself to do yoga. I can paint. I’m excited to have the luxury of boredom, of watching the dust filaments turn in the afternoon light. I’m excited to remember the other parts of me, the ones that have gathered dust because they weren’t needed in the past few years.

I can rest. I can withdraw for a blessed moment before I need to launch myself to the world, ever vigorously.  A breather.

Doorways. Endings and beginnings. It’s wonderfully strange how things are unfolding. I’m not yanked out; I’m being moved the way the sky’s colors sinks to sunset or rises to dawn. Thanks to the admission requirements of the schools I’ve been applying to, I’ve been recollecting and writing about what I’ve been through and what I’ve learned.  It’s as if I’m brought to collect myself and my pieces as I prepare to leave. Tied together nicely with a bow.

The difficulties and disappointments of the past few years have been recast in the light of growth. I’ve grown thankful for them, including the ones that I caused or worsened myself. They’ve been instrumental in herding me to where I am now. I’ve grown tremendously: I was able to do things I thought I couldn’t do, and recovered some self-esteem along the way. I learned to champion myself. I fumbled and felt the invisible walls that held me back and I’m working on untying those stubborn knots.

In a certain angle, it’s an education on how human beings really are. I’ve been let down many times; only to realize later how askew my expectations were in the first place. The sliver between hero and villain have since expanded into a vast space that homes everyone. It’s a place better compatible with patience and compassion, not that I’ve mastered either.

What’s a human being? What’s a human organization? With noble intentions and base instincts. Inconsistent. Momentarily generous. Needy and vulnerable. Compensating. Lost. Laughing. Unaware. Flashes of aggression and violence. In pain. Tired. Distracted. Joyful.

Flawed, but trying. Trying, but flawed. The order depends on my day.

I’ll tell you, my basest, most selfish, most indulgent instinct is withdrawal. Human beings tire me. Many times, in the face of frustration, I wish to be left alone so I can do what I want or need to do without needing to consider messy internal lives and without having to work at alien paces. My vision of peace is a farm in the mountains; I take care of animals and grow my own flowers and food; it’s cool and it snows sometimes.

I also know that that it’s the hollowest life I can live. The ethical life is the disturbed one, we learn from Levinas. I don’t think we’ll ever run of things to do if we want to make the world a fairer, better place for everyone– flawed, messy, trying everyone.

But every once in a while, it does us good to go up in the mountains to breathe.

Welcome back

Imagine that. Thirty and married and still you.

And now, scared shitless, again, like you were 10 years ago. And about to be launched, ready or not, to a whole new, undefined life.

And the things that happened the past few years, when you haven’t been writing? The world moved very fast and you’ve survived quite a bit.  You’ve changed some and yet you remained essentially the same. You’re both softer and tougher now, and you still laugh at the same stupid things.

It’s now possible to thread a narrative for the past ten years: the first three in a stumbling haze of post-school uncertainty and the last seven a curious journey that rounded you back to where you came from. Philosophy, Levinas, ethics, and the Atenean ethos. But this time, you meet them in the wild where they’re more alive than they ever were, when they pinned, studied, and dusty in your cube back in Dela Costa.

It’s funny and strange how it works out like that. It almost feels meaningful, like a strange suggestion that– that nothing ever goes to waste? that I’m where I ought to be? The fact that I have to write about the past few years as part of my admissions requirements– it feels a bit too on the nose, doesn’t it? Nevertheless, I’m grateful for the symmetry and the cohesion it makes for my story.

No. I’m just grateful.

On spiraling back

T and C says that if we examine our lives, we see patterns and cycles. Every few years, the same monsters appear, but in different forms. Human life isn’t linear as the relentlessness of time would suggest; not is it cyclical- or else it will bring us the exact same sorrows and joys (perhaps like Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence of the same). It’s a spiral process, T says. We circle around the same issues and pains but, I guess if we do it right, we enter them more deeply each time. If we allow ourselves, we are changed by the encounter.

The depth in which we engage our pains largely depend on our willingness and courage to face these demons. Otherwise, we are bound to them. I don’t suppose it’s some mystical force that traps us in the same cage. This is a consequence of the shapes of our own character– the roughness of our surfaces always catch the same debris. The Greek tragedies have warned us: it is not fate or destiny that dooms a hero, it’s his own tragic flaw (see: Achilles’ and Oedipus’ hubris). We must stave off sleep, we must continue to overcome ourselves. And the work never ends.

Repetition. It’s an old insight of Freud. We are bound to repeat our traumas; it is the responsibility of a therapist to bring these wounds to light to cease the unconscious patterns that plague us. Many, many years ago, I knew this. But now I know how little I had understood. The potency of old ideas come to fore and I am humbled.

You are young, C said, life has not begun for you. I listened knowing that my vocabulary of wounds is too elementary to understand what she meant.

I’ve entered a new space. I’m in the middle of a storm. Life is changing. The currents are fast and violent and it’s difficult to maintain my bearings. I’m holding on to the few things I know to be true. This poem by my college professor is one of them.

Kung Papaano,  by Rofel Brion

Kung paano dumadapo
ang buto sa malumot na bato,
at nagiging binhi’t lumalago,
gumagapang tungo sa iba pang bato,
namumulaklak, hitik na hitik,
at bago malanta’y nagkakalat ng bango,

ganito sana ako maging ako,
ganito sana ako maging sa iyo.

For most of my twenties, (in varying degrees of intentionality) this poem has animated me. It has always articulated for me what a good human life means. It means to leave the world better than I had entered it. My life must dedicate itself into opening space for bango to exist for others, however minute or momentary,  however futile against the vast emptiness of time and space, and despite our assured quiet end (death, forgetfulness, entropy).

It also means another thing: to flourish. The imagery of the seed is so potent and rich. All that you had in you comes to fullness. Or like fireworks, you come to a satisfying end, assured of not having wasted anything.

But what does it mean to flourish? What are the conditions of possibility of flourishing? For a seed to burst through its dormancy, the world gives it water, sunlight, air; and for it to live its life to fruition, it needs the steady constancy of the right conditions. How do you seek this for yourself? How do you create it for others? The tectonic movements in my life give spirit to these living questions.

But then again, all these are articulations of a question, an old friend: Where is my place in Earth?

* * * * *

Many things that have happened in the past few years. The last time I wrote in this site, life had been different. I haven’t written in long while– at least not in the intentional and sustained manner I’m attempting to do now. I’ve come home again from a long sojourn. I’ve gained some things, and lost others. Something borrowed, something blue. I learned that the world is kinder, harsher, and stranger than I thought.

I hope that the world had been kind to you in the past few years.

Writing has always been a return to form for me. I emerged into consciousness, writing. It carried me through tumultuous adolescence to nutrient-rich college years. After my schooling, I’ve flitted in and out of writing– battling conflicting feelings about it. It had been buried under the rubble of the demands of the world. Underneath that forgetting is the anxiety over the vanity of writing, especially writing in a public space. Its narcissism. There are billions of people in the world– who is to say that my thoughts and remembrances are anything of worth?

I have no answers and I don’t ever think I’ll reach a point where I’ll demand to be heard. But here I am again, emerging from my nook of the universe to tell you how the universe is from here.

Ang Nagdaan

Ang Nagdaan
Edgar Calabia Samar

Ayaw kong magpahuli
Tinalon ko ang bakod.
Maysa-pusa akong lumapag
sa lupa. Nagkakahugis na
ang braso ko sa dilim.

“Huwag ka nang babalik!”
Huling hiyaw ng Tatay noon
bago namaalam ang kalahati
ng kaniyang katawan. Tahimik
na tahimik kahit ang kuliglig.

Suwail nga ako. Suminsay
ako’t hinirap siya, natakanghod
sa bakuran, puro kalmot
ang bisig. Tumitig siya sa akin,
ngunit di na ako nakilala

Huli na ito.
Wala na ang nakaraan.

Relevant, in many levels.

DENKEN & DANKEN II: D

 

A moment to mark this simple, lovely quiet moment before it is swallowed by the noise, the absurd, and the ultimately meaningless. May this memory tide me over the next flurries.

Yesterday,
Warm afternoon at home,
Electric fan buzz and breeze,
Me: chopping carrots and singing the Strumbellas

* * * * *

I’m working on a new piece; it’s coming along well. I hope to have it out before I move away from the space where it’s the central insight.  It’s called the slow march to progress and it speaks of growing up as a slow unfolding that often surprises us. As usual, I have too many ideas and I need to prune it.

* * * * *

Life has been kind and well. I was at home with my folks for the last couple of days. Somewhere in this experience is a meditation on how our rhythmic return to home (to places, to people) is never really mundane, but drives us into deeper community with ourselves and the world. We gather a better sense of self in these meetings with people who love us, who have kept safe whatever of us they could catch. We remember and see ourselves through them and their memories.

For many years, I was irritated at my mother for being insufferably disorganized and hyper (accusations that could veritably be leveled on me now!). But this weekend, I saw it in different light. Maybe it’s because we’ve all gotten older and understood more of the world.

Before she retired, my mother took charge of the annual Christmas decorations in her office. Every year, she comes up these creatively themed DIY’s to the delight of her office mates. I have vague and sparse memories through the years of me trying to dip into her nighttime projects and her wild assortments of knick-knacks and baubles (personalized jars, paper birds, ribbons, little flowers with their wire stems, little paper-clay baskets with fruits, etc).

It wouldn’t come as a surprise that I’ve developed a deep liking for crafts and working with my hands, a predilection discovered by a colleague when I took charge of decorating a room for my boss’s surprise baby shower.

She asked me for help in decorating some office spaces for Christmas. I felt the string of familial affinity strummed. I thought it a good project for her, she must have missed decorating for Christmas as she has been retired for the last couple of years. So I asked for her help. So she did help. That isn’t really the surprising part.

What surprised me this weekend is really her relentlessness. There is no other word to describe her stamina and energy. You’d think she’s this frail little 66-year-old with her right-leg hobble. Getting up before 7 , she moves from (physical) task to task with nary a break. She cooked and cleaned after breakfast, lunch, and dinner (with an assortment of respectable dishes); repaired my brother’s shorts; made some salsa from scratch; rallied the troops (grandkids) into the car; drove to a nearby shopping mall; shopped and bargained; conceptualized a design and strung together twigs into these pretty boughs and wreaths; and, managed to nag everyone to do what they’re supposed to do . All within a day. How? Most of the time, I found myself edging to bed because it was so damn exhausting just trying to keep up with her. That she only went to take a break at 6 pm–frankly, that was awe-inspiring.

I recognize the same impulse to do something, to create anything, everything. But here I am– the whiny, chronic over-thinker, who’s always in my bed. Here I am, trying to hold myself against measured beats, but always failing.

But this. But here it is, a possible version of myself if I refuse to be held down by my ambition regular cadences. It’s a chance, it’s a door, it’s a possibility. And if she could do that all in a day, what’s a blog post after work?

From my mother, (on top of an infinite of things), I learn relentlessness and stamina and another possible version of myself.

 

Luck and Choices

We can look at life in this very simplified way: there are two major forces that shape one’s life: luck and choices. This is nothing groundbreaking. It’s true that our luck and our choices affect each other, but that would be an altogether different (but very interesting) discussion. For the purposes of this post, let’s stick to a slim distinction between the two.

Luck, simply put, are things we did not choose. Sometimes luck takes form as the irreversible truths of our history: our genes, where and when we were born and raised; who our parents were and how they have raised us; the culture, the politics, and the conflicts of our age. The consequences of these will last us until the end of our days.

We know that life’s playing field is not equal and it’s simply because we never start at the same place. The easiest way to demonstrate this is economically. A child raised by elite parents will likely become an elite adult himself. As he grows up, he gets the best nutrition to aid his forming brain. He is schooled in the best institutions in the country. He has all the time to study because he doesn’t have to till the fields or anything. He will be smart and know many things. His friends are the elite children of his country– people who will eventually occupy critical positions of power. He is influenced by his social spheres’ “successful” tastes, perspectives, and attitudes. The ‘success’ or the ‘correctness’ of these dispositions seem to be evidenced by the attendant economic plenitude of those who hold them. He is set up for “success.”

A child raised by poor parents aren’t as likely to become as rich as the first child. It’s not necessary to spell out the analog. Not to say that poorer people don’t have the chance, but that their chances are significantly slimmer.

Sometimes, luck also manifests in the gears that shift around us, without our consent or participation. They affect us nevertheless: we chance upon this book, movie, or stray kitten; we find each other, in the many senses of finding; we lose each other, in the many senses of losing; and examples like these, to infinity.

This we know. This we all know. Our history and our facts are something we have to make peace with, at the very least. The hope is that we go beyond that acceptance. Hopefully, we learn how to love this particular spot of grass whence we witness the stars.

 

Then, there are our choices.

It’s been six years since college ended, and it’s been ten since high school.  My peers and I have entered into our mid-to-late twenties and now that we have traveled farther apart in time and in choices we see begin to see differences very clearly. From a TED talk I watched a few months ago, I note this beautiful metaphor:

Twentysomethings are like airplanes just leaving LAX, bound for somewhere west. Right after takeoff, a slight change in course is the difference between landing in Alaska or Fiji. – Meg Jay

Classmates and old friends are really fantastic groups for comparison. It’s because, somehow, you leave from the same airport. There is no stronger reference group than the people with whom you shared a significant and formative era of your lives. At one point, they weren’t too far from you. There were enough significant similarities that have allowed life to lump you together (same age, geographic location, socioeconomic status, etc).

This is where the cruelty of Facebook starts: because you are given easy access and reminders of the apparent successes of your peers, you see achievements and lifestyles which you think could have been yours if you weren’t so goddamn (insert insecurity here) or if you had (insert lacking resource here).

I’ve always been fascinated about growing up and aging, and even some of my writings when I was twenty was about how people will change in a few years. I’ve pay attention to how things have changed, and how they stay the same, how we repeat our patterns, how we decay, and how we are able to push through. Recently, the distances have stretched so far it incontrovertible and possible even in-convertible. What really fascinates me now is how far these trajectories have taken all of us. There were people who, at one point in time and space, shared a slow and sleepy Wednesday afternoon listening to Filipino poetry. Now we have exploded all over the world.

How we have spent our time. How we have taken on the world. How we have nourished ourselves and others. With whom have we spent our time. These are the habits and the decisions we make everyday, these are how we style our lives. It spells the difference between gaining or losing twenty pounds, the state of your skin, the people who stay, your work, your creative life, your attitude, the speed of your thoughts. It is is the distance between Bangkok and Calgary. Our lives is the payment for the choices that we make.

One lesson I never forgot was a Great Books class on the Inferno.  In Dante’s Inferno, the particular fate of the souls in hell are not arbitrary punishments meted by an accountant God. It is the full realization of their choices, their sin. The lovers in the second circle of hell are perpetually besieged by winds, which is truly the torrents of lust and passion. Deeper in Inferno are the ones who have committed suicide. They have found ‘incarnation’ as trees while their human corpses hung from the branches. They could never return to they bodies which they rejected in their self-destruction.  Satan, half-frozen in the deepest circle of hell, is devouring three sinners. It’s really a poetic way of showing selfishness. Everything revolves around you, and there is no one else bit you.

Which brings us to point: there is no need for a retributive eschatology. We need not wait for our reward or punishment after we die. Our lives are the payment for the choices that we make.

I’ve grown to admire people who endure and persist in their choices. Their silent efforts are beginning to bloom in sight. Our doctors and our lawyers are freshly born into our workforce. A shy sometime-friend in high school is now a semi-famous Cosplayer, with a lot of cool pictures to boot. And how can we forget to mention the people who plunged fiercely into a healthy lifestyle.

A highschool batchmate published a book of short stories (so jealous, but I haven’t even written anything in years). Some former classmates have entered into the academe. They weren’t the geniuses in class. They have silently kept on digging to find themselves at admirable depths.

In a conversation with my friend S., she stressed the importance of commitment to what you are doing, to your choices. Mag-taya, she said. That means giving your all to something even if it sometimes feels frustrating or pointless. It is with the same courage that you examine the value of your something. If it is truly pointless, summon the courage so say no to it. Quit it so you can say yes to something else.

From Sartre, ever unremitting in his call for authenticity, we learn that we must not shirk from the responsibility cast upon us by our freedom. Authenticity consists in knowing that our lives are as we have molded them. To be authentic is not to dwell on dreams but in actions; it is not to hide behind excuses but to own up to the disappointing parts of ourselves. It is not because our parents have failed to raise us the way we ought to be raised; it is not because the world has failed to love us the way we ought to be loved.

I always thought that this philosophy is too harsh and unrealistic; especially because there are matters in our lives that are really beyond our control (see section above). For instance, it’s unreasonable to hold a child entirely accountable for how his life goes. A ten-year old can blame his parents for ‘fucking up my life’ but when you’re pushing forty and still singing the same tune…

Sartre’s sentiments ring truer as we get older.  We’re getting older.

What I learned recently is this: our choices don’t invalidate what is ours because of luck. But they tip the playing field to make it a little more even. And, really, they are all we can be proud of.

Denken & Danken I: V

Today, the sun was warm and the sky was bright. There was some studying, some reading, some napping, and some loose writing. There was a tuna melt sandwich in the middle of those somes. Now there is some writing and maybe later there will be some light exercise. It’s a calm, wonderful, and solitary day.

I haven’t been diligent in writing, yes. I had a misplaced desire some months ago about wanting to polish the writing I put up here. These requirements really backfired on me. I just kept on adding bullets to my list of things to write, but I didn’t get any real writing done. Writing, especially polished and structured writing, takes time and I’m always daunted by the prospect of squeezing it in between noisier, more demanding tasks.

So today, I cross off one of those items. In honor of this calm and clear day, I wanted to write something cheery and joyful. But, heck, most of my reveries are bleak meditations on human life and its intended punchlines are lessons I ought to drill into my head… I really ought to lighten up sometimes.

Here’s a happy post, a beginning of something good.

* * * * *

Marcus Aurelius started his Meditations with a homage to the people from whom he had learned many admirable things. I’ve read that book nearly ten years ago (!) I’ve always wanted to do a similar list. So this will be similar to my serial Brief Letters to Unnamed People.

One of the people I admire the most is my friend V. She is the strongest and one of the most genuinely selfless people I know. We’re part of a group of friends reaching back when we were ten. We weathered silly childhood squabbles, insecurities, and crushes. Together, our group pulled through those unbearably awkward inchoate years of puberty.

Since she was a child, she has always been generous. She treats people. She gives away things and food: candies, popsicles, stationary, Sailor Moon novelty things. In later years, she took to baking and she makes these luxurious cupcakes. She’d go to her medschool and handout her cupcakes. She’d drop by her friends’ houses to give them bags of candy during Christmas. She knew the names of the streetchildren near her undergrand university.

Her attunement to the needs of others went farther than the superficial little things. She was the brave one who asked our sophomore advisers if we could spend the money we won as a class to fund our classmate’s father’s operation (Our advisers seemed to dislike the idea; they wanted (and we eventually did) go to Enchanted Kingdom instead.) She was the brave one who sent a birthday present to an acquaintance who, some months prior, wrote a note on Facebook about having no one remember his birthday. She was brave enough not to send an anonymous gift.

When we were fourteen, I was full of angst and thought I thought farther than anyone else because of a startling book I read and believed in. I asked her one of the points raised in that book: how do you know you’re really being generous or if you’re doing it for the fuzzy feeling that you get when you give? The question didn’t occur to her and it baffled her. To her, that didn’t really seem like a problem. Concerns like that never really stopped her from being her.

Some months ago, M, V, & I were catching up over dinner. She was relating her frustrations about being a doctor, especially when her patients die. M and I advised her that she ought to detach herself from her patients otherwise she will always be heartbroken. She said no. She said, it helps her do her best when she’s attached to her patients. She said, if the patient was her father, she wouldn’t want the doctor to give up too fast. She takes to heart that her patients are someone’s beloved. Imagine if someone lost a beloved because the doctor didn’t want to care too much?

She told us a story.

She had a patient, a teenager who was in a coma. There were complications in her case and she needed to undergo an operation to clean out her system (I don’t quite get the medical details). Without the operation, she would certainly die but even if they pushed through with it, there was no assurance that she will ever wake up.

Patient’s family was poor. V didn’t want to give up on her, so she paid for the operation herself.

The point of V’s story was her frustration regarding the family’s doctor who gave up. He advised against the operation because there’s no assurance that their daughter will ever regain consciousness anyway. The family followed this doctor’s advice and the girl eventually died. But who knows whether she would have woken up a day, a week, a month hence?

M and I asked the bit she left out, Did they pay you back the money? They didn’t know I paid for it, she said. She went back to talking about the doctor.

What surprised me wasn’t just her story, it was the way that she told her story. She didn’t omit her kindness neither did she draw attention to it. She was a footnote in her own story. It wasn’t a circumvented story designed to leave us an impression of her generosity and martyrdom, it was a story about a girl in a coma who shouldn’t have died too soon.

Later that night, I figured out the answer to the question I asked her when we were fourteen.

From V, I learn about true generosity. I learned that selflessness is a matter of unselfconscious presence. It is not a denial or omission of oneself but a forgetting of oneself.

Since I have a pretty new theme. I have to put pictures on the posts now! That’s M, V, and I in Cebu nearly a year ago. It would have been cool to post our photos with the Butandings if those photos weren’t the most goddamn unflattering set I’ve ever seen in my life.