2020: THE YEAR OF LIVING CAREFULLY Part 3

 It's official.  

In three hours, 2020 will be all over and we have pinned all our hopes that 2021 will treat us more kindly.  As I have written before, I am not of the belief that the moment the clock strikes twelve that all our challenges and agonies embodied by 2020 will be wiped clean like a Magic Slate. 

Nope.  As Elsa said in that Ricky Lee classic filmed by the great Ishmael Bernal, " Walang himala!"   Tomorrow we will wake up to realize that 2021 is but a sequel to 2o2o but (again hopefully) with a better narrative that is less interesting but more compassionate.

As part of my personal superstition I made it a point that all pending jobs and bills have been fulfilled and paid before the year is over.  I have made it a personal mission to make sure that all my work for 2020 is duly accomplished and that the utility bills have been paid --- insuring that there is enough stock of rice, salt and sugar in the pantry.  Such are the beliefs I inherited from my mother.  You do not want anything of 2020 to stick to you as you cross the border of the following year.

Then there is this thing about New Year's Resolutions.  I mean --- do people still make these "To Do"-lists in the name of self-improvement as a year comes to a close and the prospects of another twelve months mark a new beginning?  I do think the Gen Z-ers are even into that considering their Weltenschauung is all about "Whatever!"  But then again it is interesting to list down all the areas that require improvement as far as personal assessments are concerned.  Y0u do not need a New Year revelry to pinpoint where you can improve your life.  

Maybe it is because the internalization is far better when you are philosophizing after consuming half a bottle of red wine or maybe seven straight shots of Jose Cuervo.  

So as a final word to mark the end of The Year of Living Carefully, let me list my so-called resolutions for the Year of the Ox.  The Year of Mickey Mouse wasn't too good or entertaining --- so let's see if we can dance around the Year of the Bull.

(1) I shall be more concerned about my health than my waistline. 

When you reach that certain age, you will come to accept that no one is going to love you because of your body.

No one in his or her right mind would want to ravage your body with his or her love.

No amount of hours working out, Keto diet and visits to your favorite heaven-sent cosmetic medico can ever reverse what the Law of Nature dictated involving aging, metabolism and the passage of time.

So if I spend a good hour to an hour and a half doing my cardio, it is not because I am aspiring to regain my 32 inch waistline when I was not even half my present age.  I shall be content with the use of moisturizers and sweating it out to get rid of the toxins but I am not going to delude myself into thinking that I can impersonate any of the Bench Body models.

Love me as a cream puff ... or leave me.  If you cannot handle my love handles, then you do not deserve my love. Naks!

(2) I am not giving an flying f--k about opinions of people who I know do not also give a flying f--k about me.

I think if you have lived for more than six decades you gain the license to choose to think the way you want to think as long as you do not go around deliberately hurting anybody --- most especially yourself.

When I was twenty, I learned that half of success is getting along with others.

When I was thirty, I found out that success involves choosing the right people to be with.

When I was forty, I realized that success is not fulfillment and you need to charter your course with the right advice from people around you.

But when I turned fifty I came to the point of accepting that the world cannot be defined by your needs alone ... and that there is no one else like you so deal with it.

And now that I am sixty plus, I have decided that since I cannot please everybody ... then I should stop trying to do so and only define my happiness by giving joy to those who really give a s--t about me. 

Regardless of how good a human you are or how evil you have become, someone will always find a reason to give you the finger.  So if somebody tells you to f--k off, give the creature a head to toe look and ask, " And who you? "

(3) Affirmation in life is not like Facebook: it is not based on your number of friends and likes you receive in a day. So I will give more appreciation to the people in my life rather than the acquisitions to define my environment.

The best people in my life (aside from my nephews and nieces) are those I have known more than half my present human existence.

There may be some additions here and there but I realized that each time I host my Christmas dinners, even the so-called new friends have been around for nothing short than a decade.

I would like to keep it that way.  As Stephen Sondheim said in one of his songs in Merrily We Roll Along, old friends are the true treasures because they are there not for keeps but hopefully forever.   There are some people who are like those who pass through the revolving doors of your life but others stay.  And those who stay are your true treasures --- and not the temporal material things which you sometimes mistake as the ultimate gauge of how lucky you are.

Some possessions appreciate through time but they can never give you the love and comfort that true friends can yield ... especially at times when you need them the most.

I do not think you can find any sort of credible consolation hugging your Benz when you feel all alone in the world. And if you do, get the f--k out of my sight.

(4) I will choose to say "no" when I want to say "no" and not feel guilty about it.

Tama na, sobra na, abuso na.

I am sometimes surprised how I can still be bamboozled by emotional blackmail.  Or this Filipino sense of obligation, utang na loob and all that sort of cultural diversionary tactics.  It makes refusal seem so heartless, morbid or even ... uncivilized.

But it is not.

Again,  I find myself trying to please everybody at the expense of myself because I want to save face or look good and,  in the process, practicing civilized hypocrisy. There are moments when you feel you have to give in to requests because you would feel like a rectum personified if you said no.  As I said, more often than not, you fall into the same old trap over and over again because you do not want to come across as arrogant, snobbish ... or at worst, entitled.  More often than not, you succumb to your own personal paranoia AGAIN about what other people might say ... think ... feel or even conclude.

OK.  Enough of that.  If I feel it doesn't fit into what I want, then I will say NO and will not require myself to apologize ... or even be demanded an explanation. It is a privilege that comes with age and not stature.

There is just no more time for that sort of bullshit.

And finally...

(5) You have to make time for what you want as much as what you need.

Enough of the pressure of deadlines, requirements and expectations.

There is such a thing as creative selfishness and it has got nothing to do with this seeming obligation to hug the world and sing Kumbaya.  It is all about centering on your own wants while being aware of your needs. It is about self-love which is as important as all claims of altruism or wanting to save the world.

I must go back to that practice of reading a book every ten days.

I must go back to sketching ... which I gave up so many years ago for a variety of reasons.

I must really cut down on television binging because it has become an addiction that subtracts time for me to do other things.

Although I respect deadlines, I will not allow myself to be terrorized by unmanageable scheduling.

Most important, I will cease from endless trying to prove that I am still relevant because in the larger scheme of things, who really give a f--k?

In short, regardless of challenges and obstacles, I will try my damn best to make 2021 more than fulfilling.

I shall choose to be happy.

2020: THE YEAR OF LIVING CAREFULLY PART 2

As I write this, there is just a day more to go before choruses will burst into "Auld Lang Syne" not with nostalgic sadness but a sense of relief.  More so, a near-desperate sense of hope. Time Magazine said it best with their cover: the year 2020 with an enormous X ... not marking the spot but simply cancelling.

It was not even a roller coaster year: just one that demanded extraordinary care and attention.  2020 shall be the year best remembered when people had to hide their smiles behind face masks --- and, in the case of our country, walked around like cast members of The Mandalorian in an assortment of not only masks but also face shields.  The scenario was close to dystopian.  Whereas the previous year we entertained ourselves with a proliferation of zombies,  now we have turned into parodies of space men with the very air we breathe becoming the source of ultimate danger.

But not everything about 2020 can be all that bad.  It was not great but just think of it as ...it could have been worse.  That is the best position you can take in order to look back with any semblance of positivity.  Why? Because it was bad.  And it takes extraordinary effort to smile and philosophize while watching the world you knew and lived through all your life crumble then rearrange under the heading, The New Normal.

So that makes the Old Normal as the The New Abormal.  And that is depressing. Why?  Because I still want to have a bowl of steaming hot ramen together with my nephews in our favorite restaurants in Osaka ... I still yearn for the laughter and stories exchanged over dinners with my closest friends in our favorite digs here in Manila. I want to see my students in the classroom and not in little boxes as I spend hours in front of a computer monitor talking to an illuminated slab. I want to go back to the gym ... I want the hubbub and cacophony of malls ... I want ... I want. But it cannot be anything like that any more. 

And it seems like it will take more than just passing time before we can get to anything close to that.

So we say instead: it could have been worse.  Some people had it bad.  Others had it at its worst.  And here we are finally bidding adieu to the year we have decided to hate with hopes that when the clock strikes midnight, the pumpkin will turn into a golden carriage again.

But still we learned our lessons.  We realized that without seeing the good in all the things we have gone through, we will only live in utmost misery soaking on the tub of the bad.  So let me take this time to mark the final hours of 2020 by actually thanking the year for what these challenging twelve months have taught me.

(1) Clothes do not make a man when you are stuck at home and working in front of a computer. Now if I can only keep my fingers from pressing the ADD TO CART button in each and every online store that pops up on my timeline in Facebook and Instagram, I could claim to have achieved the wisdom of the Yoda.   Not the Baby Yoda but the crinkled green pea with ears version.  

Even at the start, I realized that I have too many clothes (Kasi naman, when you see the SCREAMING FOUR LETTERS IN RED that spells SALE, nawawala ako sa aking sarili) and too many shoes.  But unlike one of my nephews who believes he is a centipede with the number of sneakers he has purchased since he crossed puberty, I am just your regular boomer still trying to dress Millennial until I realized that ... wait, a minute.  I have all these rags and footwear and absolutely no wear to go.

When your major event for the week is a quick run to S&R to buy your groceries --- or that your idea of outdoor life is the GCQ-approved thirty minute walk around your gated village, you realize that there is really very limited opportunities for you to dress to the nines and impress people with your sartorial taste.

Your oversized t-shirts and housewear shorts purchased from Lazada can and should serve the purpose.

(2) Now is the chance to be that somebody you always wanted to be but never had the time to do so.  

I always (quietly, covertly) complained that there are so many things that I had to do so much so that there was no time left for me to do what I really wanted to do.

This did not only include screenplays and stories that I really, really wanted to write but had to give way to projects that I had to fulfill to keep the wheels of commerce rolling. But this also involves things I had to give up because of the erratic work hours I keep, sometimes shoving aside plans just to be able to beat deadlines and attend to matters in both school and filmmaking.

I remember last February when I sighed to one of my friends and said, "All I am asking is maybe three days of down time ... just three days when I can focus on what I really have been yearning to do for years and never found the window in my calendar to address."  Well, guess what?  Careful the wish you make.  The three days turned out to be ten months and going on indefinitely.

And I still do not have enough time to do everything that I have always wanted to fill my time.

There are the boxes of books that I want to read: there is a Japanese term for that. Tsundoku. And now it a choice between reading that book that has been sitting on your shelf or night table or watching the latest Korean Drama warranting buzz from friends who are equally addicted to this form of entertainment.

In short ... when you try to be that somebody you always wanted to become --- you find yourself still not having enough time after ten months of self-exile and isolation.

(3) Regardless of age, there is always something to discover and/or rediscover about yourself.

Confinement can either bring the best or the worse in people.

When you do not consider your home a sanctuary where you can be who you want to be for this is your exclusive space on the Third Rock,  then you are looking at the past ten months as incarceration.

But if you see the limitation of space as an opportunity to savor your "sanctuary" which is your home then you get to realize all the wonders that you can discover or rediscover about yourself.

I never appreciated my garden until I was forced to look at it since the spinning bicycle I had to acquire in the absence of the gym made me stay in the patio and glare at the pants while I am huffing and pumping away.

I never knew my neighborhood until I was compelled to do my other form of cardio exercise which meant walking around the village for at least thirty minutes four to five times a week.  I literally go around the streets, amusing myself with the variation of discovering more nooks and crannies of my community, looking at the houses and familiarizing myself with my corner of the world.  And to think that I have been living here for thirty-two years and I have never seen my surroundings in as detailed a fashion as I have nowadays.

And yes, it feels good to say good morning to a neighbor ... or a jogger, or a cyclist or anyone for that matter who is immerself himself/herself in the pleasures of sunlight and Vitamin D.

(4) Again ... regardless of how many decades you have celebrated in this present earthly existence, no one can ever tell you that you're too old to like, love or learn something.

There is this thing about acting your age, behaving according to the chronological order of the years you have been consuming oxygen from this atmosphere ... or leaving carbon footprints.  And you reach a certain point when you say that you are too old to wear skinny jeans or oversized shirts you can buy at H&M or those Korean style clothes purchasable online. Well, one thing I realized is that you really shouldn't give a flying f--k about what other people expect from you.

The quarantine has taught me to accept the fact that I got this far (so I must be lucky) and that the next few steps are uncertain (well, more ambiguous than the usual) and that life is so unpredictable, unchartable and unplannable.  What will happen will happen so I am going to make myself happen without having to worry what people think because I am doing things which are not expected from me.

Yes, I am a Boomer and proud of it --- because I am only praying to the heavens above that all these Millies and Gen Z-ers with their basta attitude will get to live as long for I plan to be around for another thirty years.  And having lived through the Beatles all the way to BTS, I know I have every right to appreciate and dance to I Saw Her Standing There all the way through Dynamite.

It feels great when you reach my age even in these times of great uncertainty because you already have the perspective (and hopefully the wisdom) to look at things from a far wider point of view.  Yes, I love K-Dramas ( I think Start Up and It's OK not to be OK are just terrific) in the same vein that I love Amazon Prime's The Boys or Netflix's Black Mirror and The Queen's Gambit. I no longer care about opinions about me especially those who make a living out of opinions or worse ... those who have opinions in order to make themselves feel better.

Despite the restrictions of quarantine, there is so much out there readily available and yours for the asking ... if you know where to look and know how to ask.

Being obsessed with what other people think of you is a condition worse than any Enhanced Community Quarantine.  That is because you weld your own prison bars and define yourself from the eyes of others.

And finally, to cap off 2020, I shall crown this blog with a cliche.

(5) I learned the value of gratitude. I learned to stop looking for what I do not have and gave importance to what has already been given to me.  My definition of ambition has been rebooted: it is no longer about how far I could go or how high I can climb.  It is all about valuing the here and now because life does not owe you anything: you owe the world something --- and that is to be appreciative of life.

Goodbye, 2020.  Believe it or not, I will say thank you.

Thank you for keeping me safe.  Thank you for keeping my most loved ones safe --- both friends and family.

Thank you for keeping my students safe.

Thank you for teaching us through the most humbling experience to make us all realize that --- well, mankind, you ain't such a big deal after all.

 

2020: THE YEAR OF LIVING CAREFULLY Part 1

Two more days to go.

Everyone is praying, hoping, wishing, demanding that the new year will be different and that everything so wrong about 2020 will go away the moment the clock strikes twelve and the firecrackers light the skies with enough noise to ward off the evil spirits.  

We wish it were as simple as that but it isn't.  It is not meant to be.  

We realize that when 2021 comes in we still be very much in the same state as we are in now, hoping that we are taking one step forward but not after two steps behind.

For all that we have gone through in 2020, we know that it is a year that we will always remember yet we shall choose to forget.   

But all that we have experienced ... all we have endured  would be useless, wasted --- if we did not learn our lessons.  

And even as early as last January we knew that there was something extraordinary about the year that matched the digits to point to clear, unfaltering vision.  20/20 was supposed to suggest that what is in front us is made lucid, perfectly clear because  our eyes are equipped with the right sharpness and perspective.  Yet this was what the year offered.

It would be senseless to list down the names of all the people we knew or loved and lost this year without reliving the varying shades of grief.  

Some of those who left us we have known only by name --- others have come and gone through those revolving doors of our lives while a few who really mattered in the sense that they were a part of who we are and what we have become.  The pain of their departure was emphasized by the fact that many of them had to die alone, isolated from their loved ones because of the threat of infection.

The cruelty of the situation was not only the panic brought by the pandemic --- or the paranoia.  The real punishment was in the distance: social distance meant to protect us from one another by keeping us away from each other.

We who may have taken each other for so much for granted are now punished with estrangement.  We are confined in our homes and made to feel like prisoners of our own sanctuaries. We are kept away from people we loved --- as proof of how much we loved them. We have become the carriers of the virus that can end the life of people who come near us unwittingly or with urgency.

As a result of all this, wee have consciously and unconsciously changed.  

Yes, we tried out everything to surive. But we also had to find ways to keep our sanity, to be able to endure the predictability and mediocrity of going through the monotony of days not to mention domestic claustrophobia.

Thus, we sought for diversions. We took up hobbies. We grew and appreciated plants. We baked bread and cookies. We glued our eyes on other people's lives in social media --- and spent days and nights watching Netflix and YouTube.  

Even if others were already addicted to K-Dramas years before, Crash Landing On You came at that perfect time when people were desperately trying to fight the Stockholm Syndrome during the first weeks of the quarantine.   

Suddenly people (like me) discovered the richness and complexity of these Asian dramas.   Yes, the quarantine has multiplied K-Drama fans by the thousands --- aggravated by the sad fact that a major commercial network was forced to close down.

Suddenly the ecosystem of entertainment changed. What used to fill our spare hours and our down time changed drastically because of social distancing.

Movie houses were shut down. People have migrated to the digital platforms not only in Netflix or IFlix or IWant or Amazon Prime ... but watching films and features in Facebook and especially YouTube.  The diversion of interest from commercial television was evident among those who could afford subscription to these streaming sites or have enough money to purchase data.  Yet, for some reason, the madlang people also diversified their interests and sought for other forms of entertainment. 

Even the most anticipated film festivals of both the film buffs or the sambayanan suddenly had to go completely online and the results were --- to say the least --- disheartening.  

The dissolution of cinema viewing as a community experience through highly personalized small screen viewing lost a substantial amount of appeal. There are films meant to be seen on the big screen and not on the miniscule limits of one's tablet or worse --- cell phone. But there was no choice and it was as simple as that.

In short, it will still take time and rethinking for films being streamed in platforms (and sometimes simultaneously with cinemas in certain parts of the country where they are allowed to operate) to provide a concrete model wherein the producers can make money or even stand an iota of a chance to recover investments.  

As of now, the prospects of investing millions in film production is near suicidal. Without cinema houses and commercial release and pinning hopes on revenue from streaming or the purchase of content by streaming platforms, return of investment has become close to nil ... not unless the producer has the patience to wait for years to make their money back through varied ancilliaries.

The bane of keeping industries alive is not exclusive to entertainment although it is one of the most badly hit by the pandemic.  Think of tourism, the airline and hotel industries. Think of what has happened.

Oh, 2020 changed us so drastically in a matter of ten months.

Out of need, those with access changed their purchasing habits online.  We never imagined malls to turn into caverns where only about forty to sixty percent of stores remained open.   It was (really) heartbreaking to see those familiar stores one used to frequent suddenly closed for good.  

Restaurants did not offer dine-in services for months and only accepted take-outs and deliveries, Thus a great percentage of their work force were laid off  and replaced by those dashing men and women in their motorbikes of courier services.  And because people have learned to eat at home with kitchen-prepared meals, socializing via restaurants has diminished drastically. Small restaurants closed down --- unable to deal with the extended challenge of rentals and practically zero sales.

Retail has plunged since we have stopped buying new clothes ( because there is really no real need to dress to the nines in a work-from-home situation) and downsized our lives because of our equally downsized income.

So what does this all say about the year 2020? 

That we must learn.  That we must accept what we cannot change but can be part of helping create that needed change.  That we cannot insist on going back to our lives prior to February 2020 because that is no longer possible at the moment.

More than coping, we must learn to move on and open our eyes to the options left in front of us.  2021 will not provide magic spells that could simply wipe away all the challenges we have gone through this year.  Rather it will offer even more challenges because the virus is still here, the vaccine is on its way (although we do not know when and where we will get it or just how much of it will be made available to us) and yet life must go on.

2021 will not be a walk in the park --- definitely.  But even as this year is about to end, we must work hard in making the next few months a bridge for adjustment --- and acceptance.  We have to stop all illusions and delusions of entitlement that we are exempted from the scourge of this ever mutating virus.  We are now suffering the consequences brought about by years of carelessness, abuse and irresponsibility --- and Mother Nature just reminded us of how insignificant we are as mankind in the larger scheme of things.

So what were the lessons learned?  They were actually very simple --- as they were quite apparent right from the start but we just never got around to admitting these morsels of truth in our reality.

(1) We are not omnipotent.  We may have evolved enough technology to put a building full of information in a microchip smaller than a scrap of one's fingernail but we are still fallible.  We can build our own Tower of Babel but as in the Biblical, reference, that did not raise us to the level of gods but only became a vessel for confusion.  Which is exactly what we are going through right now.

(2) Uncertainty like change ... is certain.  We can do all the math in the world, swim in our pool of statistics and data analysis but that is no assurance that things will go the way that we want it.  What will happen is what is bound to happen --- and this pandemic was something we already knew was bound to happen some time or another yet we never took it seriously. We were never fully prepared for it despite the fact that pandemics happen every one hundred years or so.  And when it finally happens, the sky caves in.

(3) What we considered important has proven ... unimportant.  All the material trappings we used as medals of self-affirmation have become irrelevant or all-so-insignificant.  At a time when the whole world goes on a freeze mode, when businesses are collapsing as other industries are paralyzed, who cares about what car you drive or ride?  Who cares about what you are going to wear tomorrow ... in your zoom meeting?  All the digits that comprise your bank account may still serve as a security blanket but when the entire system of the world changes,  for just how long can you cling onto what was before?

(4) Endurance must be matched by empathy. And compassion.  Now that it has almost been a year we have been told to stay home, stay put and keep away from one another, we have come to realize how important it is to have one another. Now that we have time in our hands and literally no place to go except the immediate periphery of what we define as our safe spaces, we realize how much we took our freedom for granted, how we abused one another by sheer intolerance or even evasiveness.  So hopefully we learned our lesson well: that we do not merely fight to survive this but emerge from the experience with greater wisdom and humanity.

(5) Embrace the change and deal with it.  What may feel like a curse should be treated as a challenge. Otherwise, it would be pointless to wake up each morning feeling miserable because the ultimate solution is still not within reach.  We have to stop counting the days before this is over but instead deal with each day at a time and making the most out of it by improvising, innovating and advancing.  Yes, there is the promise of that vaccine but what does one do before the time comes when one  is armed with protection? Hibernate and marinate in misery? If that be the case, then it is not the virus from Wuhan that will be the cause of death: it is self destruction ... or worse, atrophy.

Yes, we are all hoping for a much better year in a matter of days.  Yes, we can brainwash ourselves with positive thoughts, wear the coat of optimism.  We can all sing Happy Days Are Here Again but we must never lose sight of the fact that the battle is still raging and we are still plying that long unchartered road from the damage done in 2020.  We need to keep our wits about ... but most important, we must keep our eye on the maps that we design along the way.

We are being taught a great lesson about the insignificance of mankind in the larger design of the Universe.  We are made aware that single virus that crossed over from a bat to a human being has already caused the collapse of the world as we knew it.

But more important, we are being made aware of the importance of being better than we were ... and not depending on anybody: not the politicians and their endless tug of wars for power, not even the grandstanding prophets with their variations on eternal salvation. 

All we need is to learn the lessons ... and move on to the next step. Carefully, cautiously in the most human fashion possible.

And, yes, congratulations: we survived 2020.