Q & A in a state of emergency

“State of emergency signed by GMA.” A text read which I received 11:39 am of February 24. I was then in a building somewhere in Makati, attending the second day of a two-day forum. Mixed with the alarm over the state of our country was the alarm I felt over an event I was supposed to attend that night. Will it push through or not?

“It” was a post-valentine event sponsored by a professionals group based in Quezon City, a good one hour away (sans traffic) from where I was. I received the invitation to sit on a panel weeks earlier; the panel consisting of a married couple, a single guy and me. To help remind me in the future that this is how I once felt about love and the single life, let me post and abbreviate a few of the Q & A's:

How would a guy know if it’s the right time to court?
Do you know enough about the girl to say what makes her happy and sad; what makes her laugh and what makes her cry? Think of yourselves as a student of the girl. If an exam was given about her, would you pass? If not, then it might not be the right time. We women want to be loved for who we are; not for who you think we are.

Previously you had a relationship (and a close friendship) . . . was it a good closure? What important lesson did you learn from it?
You enter into a relationship with the hope that it'll be for keeps. But in our not-so-perfect world, breakups do happen. What I learned from these aborted attachments is simply this: what it means to love and be loved. I’ve realized that the best way to learn how to love is by actually doing it and not just by reading about it. When the relationship ended, it doesn't have to necessarily mean that the other is a bad person. It's just that the relationship didn't work out. I was telling somebody who broke up with his girlfriend that it was okay to still talk with her. Time and a forgiving heart can help you sift through the rubble of a failed relationship.

What advice can you give to unattached singles?
Don't spend your days thinking,"If only I'm married, I would..." Refuse to live your lives on hold. Jim Elliot said, ''Wherever you are, be all there." Fully engage yourself in the moment and don’t be halfhearted about life. Married people sometimes envy us because we have a lot of time in our hands. Let's put this privilege to good use: develop ourselves, discover what we're good at, learn new skills, polish our character, make a difference.

Thank God for making me "me," and not the president of a crises-crazy country such as ours. In a state of emergency, this is the state of my heart. Life's still good after all.

MAI-Asia Train the Trainer Conference

"On this site in 1897 nothing happened." Thus reads the sign at Kusina ni Salud, the oriental-themed restaurant of Patis Tesoro hidden in a town in San Pablo, Laguna. This was where we had our Friday dinner. "We" are 27 publishing professionals from countries such as the Philippines, Malaysia, Nepal, Myanmar, Bangladesh, Indonesia, Australia, Singapore, Hong Kong, India, Thailand, Cambodia and the US of A.


In the cool and candlelit night (the electricity was out when we arrived; Muriel, of Hong Kong, thought that the candles were part of the dinner package), we feasted on Filipino fares such as Ubod roll, Pinakbet, Tilapia, Lechon Kawali, Turon and Buko juice. Yummy! (May ilaw man o wala, masarap talaga pagkain natin!)




Who can resist the charm of our jeepney? To travel to the resto, we rented a jeepney so many of the foreign delegates could ride our unique mode of transport for the first time.



But we did more than eat and have fun. It was five days of intensive training--learning styles, understanding codes, tuning our listening skills, preparing workshops, delivering presentations. Dr. Richard Crespo, a specialist in adult education, coached us into flexing our teaching muscles (and literal muscles too!He led early morning Pilates session. Shame on me, though, for not participating in it when others twice my age gamely joined the sessions.)

Rizal Re-Creation center, with its landscape dotted with coconut trees, was the perfect place for us to learn. I enjoyed walking in the grass, feeling the cool breeze, and inhaling the fresh air! (Here is the official class picture. Being the youngest, I volunteered to be the whiteboard cleaner and errand-runner. But it's okay. After twenty years, it's going to be somebody else's turn!)

"Help us, Lord, to continue to publish words that will lead people to turn to The Word."

loving thoughts

While clothes are left lying on my bed, waiting to be packed for a five-day training, I’m in front of the screen, writing. The call for my fingers to glide across the keyboard is just too irresistible to ignore. So please indulge me as I metaphorically steal a few bites of my dessert before I eat my vegetables.

As I push my fingers on the square keys, it’s now officially Valentines Day. Last year I greeted the occasion in the same way, by blogging at midnight. And why not make this Valentine blogging an annual tradition? I should consider making a pact with myself that I will write every time February 14 swings by. This writing I will do regardless of the state of my heart. Let’s see how long I could keep the “same time, next year” exercise. Will my views on love and relationships evolve throughout the years? Will I quit being dreamy and start being cynical? And will I . . . ?

My views on love this year is not much different from last year’s. I still think that love is not the fireworks that illuminate the sky every new year’s eve; it is the constant, steady light from a lamp that brightens a room every night. It's not being blown away by the music of a symphony orchestra; it's being warmed by the strains of a familiar tune from the radio.

And love, more than being about passion, is rather about grace. For isn’t this the same way we are loved by God—that we are loved, not because we deserved it (we didn’t and we don’t) but because He simply chose to? That we didn’t have to pay Him with good works for us to be declared worthy of love? For if that were the case, wouldn’t that be another form of barter system, “my good works in exchange for Your love”? Will it ever be right for love to be cheapened to mean an obligatory gesture by the other party because of the services to whom it was rendered? No. A thousand times no.

With this train of thought, I could go on and on and not be able to pack a single shirt in my bag before this decade ends. So let me stop. And think about love some other day.

* * * * * * * * * * *
In my book, this beats Jerry McGuire's "You complete me" line:

(Harry, realizing that he can’t let Sally slip away, follows her to the New Year’s Eve party. There he matter-of-factly states that he loves her. She dismisses him, saying, “You just can’t show up here, tell me you love me…and expect that to make everything all right.” She tells him that it doesn’t work “this way.”)

"How about this way? I love that you get cold when it's 71 degrees out. I love that it takes you an hour and a half to order a sandwich. I love that you get a crinkle up on your nose when you look at me like I'm nuts. I love that after spending the day with you I can still smell your perfume on my clothes. And I love that you're the last person I want to talk to before I go to sleep at night. And it's not because I'm lonely and it's not because it's New Year's Eve.
I came here tonight because when you realize you want to spend the rest of your life with somebody, you want the rest of your life to start as soon as possible."

A year of Shades of Grace

It’s been a year since I wrote my first post and published it under Shades of Grace. Several days—or was it weeks?—before that day in 2005, I was mulling over the idea, debating with myself about this blog thing. Initially, I was content with just visiting the blogs of my more technologically-savvy officemates. Yet as I read their posts and enjoyed the slices of their lives, it has eventually lured me into thinking, “Maybe this is the right time.”

And so I took the plunge and tapped my first ever post. Here’s how "Bike, Swim, Blog" read:

I’ve never learned to bike and to swim for exactly the same reason: fear. Fear of not learning (yes, I can be irrational at times), fear of experiencing discomfort—scraping my knees and swallowing salt water, fear of disappointing whoever will be patient enough to teach me.

This same fear has almost kept me from setting up this blog. Friends have been prodding me to try my writing hand on this fairly new technological phenomenon. Most of the time I just smile and mutter, “I will,” not really saying when. My mind says, “You can do it. You love to write.” But my heart counters: “What if you make a major grammatical error? People would wonder how you could have kept your job all these years! What if your words and experiences are too boring? Not interesting enough? Or worse, what if nobody reads your blog at all?”

The paranoid in me shouts like Goliath taunts young David. Good thing I know my way around my Bible and read how David struck down the giant with one smooth stone from the stream. Maybe, just maybe, I could hush the paranoid in me with one heartfelt, sincere entry.

So here I am, tentative but thrilled, scared but sure. I may never learn how to pedal a bike or swim in the sea. I may never be able to skid through rough terrain or glide gracefully in the water. But I can try to warm your heart, make you smile, challenge your mind. Maybe I can make new friends or reconnect with old ones by bridging the chasm between my keyboard and your screen.

All I can offer are my words.
Come, be my guest.

Fast-forward to 2006, this space in cyber-universe now feels like home. Here I can immortalize feelings and events. When I look back at a particular time, I think about what I wrote in my blog. Just two days ago, while talking with friends about how I’ve been learning to forgive, I recalled a post about stone and sand. When I mentioned to somebody about my trip to Mindanao, I told her about a post entitled "Seven Days in Mindanao." Eighty-two entries can help me do that as these posts remind me of joys and pains, people and places, small delights and grand ideals.

Not having the patience to do a scrapbook, I’m delightfully surprised to realize I’ve maintained a scrapbook of sorts—a scrapbook decorated with words, each page arranged with the gentle tapping of the computer keys. Today, on my blog anniversary, I'm thanking the Creative God who enables me to interact on life with my words. Here's wishing that these words will continue to be true to what they wish to reflect: Shades of Grace, not mine, but His.

Saturday Stampede

How heartbreaking it is to see our countrymen die while trying to get into a gameshow in the hopes of winning money. Ganito na ba tayo kahirap? 61 people died in a stampede in ULTRA, hopefuls for Wowowee, celebrating its anniversary, offering big prizes. This tragedy is doubly heartbreaking—for its result and cause. :’{

Thus reads the text message I sent to friends this mid-morning. The supposedly quiet and lazy Saturday morning was jarred by news of the tragedy in Pasig. With no appetite for breakfast, I stayed glued on the TV screen the rest of the morning. I see the Vice-President and a Secretary helping with the rescue operations. One footage shows a lifeless woman being lifted on an army truck already loaded with corpses. A camera scans through one area where several more cold bodies lay. A few hours before, they were still alive, with blood pumping with excitement. If they get inside the auditorium, they’ll have their one in a thousand shot at big bucks. Now, not only is their chance lost. All is lost.

I couldn’t help but shed some tears for these people because these are my people. Filipinos, suffering the kind of poverty that makes them endure hours, some, days even, of waiting, wishing for a single gameshow ticket, one out of the 17,000 printed. This ticket was not just paper with words; it represented the promise of a better life. It dangled the hope of their being snatched out of the pit of poverty. How much was at stake? Probably a million pesos—money they could never earn otherwise, not in a decade, or probably not in their lifetime.

I hate it that our country is desperately poor. I hate it that hundreds had to face days of hunger and sleeplessness, not in their own shackles but outside a huge building in Pasig. I hate it that many survivors of today’s stampede didn’t even have enough money to make their way back home. I hate it that one grandmother is appealing on national TV because her 5-year-old granddaughter was snatched away from her by another in the midst of the confusion.

And I hate it that all I can do, aside from watch news on TV and say a prayer, is blog about how awful I feel.