as my title suggests, yes, i am totally random. but hopefully in the quagmire of all the thoughts that pour in one ear and out the other, i hope to learn more about me, and grow as a person and as an artist.

Friday, November 24, 2006

Get a life NOW!

I was forwarded this by one of the special people in my life of whom i know will always have my back. thanks sis!

Get a life NOW!
by Jim Paredes
Get a life
Humming In My Universe
Philippine Star
November 19, 2006


(This was the column that should have appeared at the Philippine Star today. Instead, they printed a rough not-too-edited article I inadvertently sent. If you haven't read the Star version, just read this one.).

There are days sometimes when I feel the world forcing itself on me and claiming all my time and attention. I feel like this when there are deadlines to meet, bills to be paid, obligations to attend to, work to be done, and a million other things that cry for immediate attention. Surely, we all go through times like these, sometimes too often that we feel the need to put our lives on hold until we have done everything that we need to accomplish.

Many of us see life as nothing more than fulfilling the chores that daily living entails. We live in sleep mode, numbed by the drudgery of the 9 to 5 routine where a 24 hour day, a week, month or even a year does not come close to what we imagine as really living. We get up every morning and live our day just as we did the day before and the day before that and…

We reserve “getting a life” for some other time and place when everything we’re supposed to have done is finally done. Only then do we feel that our life can really begin. Trouble is, we almost never get to the “living” part because ironically, we are too busy with the business of living.

I believe this is one of the biggest causes of our misery. While we wait for “better times” – for the house to be paid, for the kids to grow up, for when there is more money to spend – to have a life, the opportunity for living passes us by. To me, this is brought about by the belief that some things are more important than others, a notion that 99.9 percent of people accept as part of life. And if we were talking of time, it seems that many of us believe that the present should always be sacrificed for a brighter future. Why not live in the now as is, where is, chores, duties, obligations and all?

Problems-- economic, social, romantic, psychological, etc. may give us reasons to be miserable. But I think the problem lies not in the fact that these issues exist. Many of them have always been there and will continue to be there in varying degrees. The problem lies in the mode we find ourselves in when we deal with them.

Many of us see our lives as repetitive, boring, and our work aimless and soul-killing. Why? Because it does not allow us to rise above the gross, quantifiable level of caring for our obvious physical and material needs alone. We are stuck in the crude literal plane where we do not allow ourselves to engage in imagination, creativity and mystery. Many of us downgrade our capacity to enjoy life.

But if we could open our senses and allow ourselves to go beyond our usual perceptions, we can begin to see that behind the ennui of our literal life is a reality with no boundaries. Einstein says that imagination is more powerful than knowledge. Why? Because imagination is not afraid to delve into the unknown and the mysterious.

Opening ourselves to the mysterious lets us see more meaning in everyday events and occurrences. The literal suddenly becomes a portal to the symbolic. Life stops being a dead-end but opens to a bigger arena that draws us to a larger experience. Where life used to be humdrum, it is now magical, even mystical. The ordinary opens up to something special and even life-enhancing. All of a sudden, we are in harmony with a vibrantly awakened Universe that wants us to be awake as well.

We should try putting ourselves in a mode where we pay close and intense attention to details all around us—a flower in bloom here, a beautiful sunset there, the food on the table, a pleasant person we meet during the course of the day—and be present to everything that we encounter. We may even try to be more adventurous and imagine that every detail we encounter is there because it has an “appointment” with us. We should at least experience a sense of wonder and awe.

If we leave ourselves wide open, all of a sudden, poetry, art, even God, can enter our lives through the window of irrelevance.

When this happens, our take on our own life and the events that happen become puzzle pieces in a cosmic conspiracy theory. Something extraordinary is unfolding all the time!

Have you noticed, for example, that when people we love die, we “see” them in our dreams and sense their presence in the most mundane places and events? We suddenly inject meaning in ordinary things, more than usual. A gust of wind, a butterfly, a door that suddenly slams becomes, for us, a significant “visitation”.

Waiting for something special to happen before we start living, as if happiness is in a place and time other than where we are, makes us lost in our own meaningless lives. But if we can apply a sense of wonder to our chores everyday, even the mundane could enchant us. We would not have to wait for another time and place and circumstance to be happy.

When we awaken to the present, life stops repeating itself. Everything becomes new, magical and meaningful. It spells the difference between being awake and being asleep, between living 10,000 days and living the same day 10,000 times.

This is really all there is to life. This is as good as it gets. Salvation is right where we are at this very moment, as I write and as you read this piece. If you still think it is somewhere else in the past or the future, I imagine you are a very lonely person.

There is no need to search further. In the ordinary is where the portal is. We just need to wake up to it and it becomes special! ###

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