Lessons Unlearned

By Emmanuelle

Do not be a glutton; eat only what is enough to relieve your hunger. Chew your food well. There is always time for everything, everyone; all it takes is proper time management; patience, too. Love your neighbor as you love yourself; better still, love them as much as God loves you. Look back in time from where you came; if you don’t, your destination may be a little harder to reach. Do not demand or expect from others what you can’t from yourself. Vote right; do not waste that one precious voice. Though sometimes, the people are justifiably matched with the leaders they deserve. Forgive and forget; you have not forgiven when you have not forgotten. At this point, imagine Yul Bryner waving his royal fingers in time with his Etcetera, Etcetera in The King and I. Nobody really can do the gesture more grandly or meaningfully.

Lessons from this life; life from these lessons. We set forth each day armed with a basketful of tried-and-tested sayings we somehow grew up with, At dusk, we go home with a fistful of grains, our own individual harvest of raw lessons learned. For the golden shower of wisdom, we beam a smile; for the hail of trouble, we heave a stoic sigh.

Lately, the above ruminations often flood this writer’s brain cells in contradictory proportion to the liquefied food trickling slowly intravenously through her. Woven in-between sleepy bliss and nightmare awakenings is this — a febrile wish that the reason the Feelings column will be more absent than present the next few weeks is because the writer got abominably lazy. Or mentally blocked. Or classically kidnapped. Or romantically diverted.

   And not because she is forced to admit defeat.  To Pain. Pain, especially one that is indescribably intense, is a very   unworthy, unsportmanly opponent. The body has a set limit to ignoring it. Or standing up to it. In the end, one establishes resistance or allergy to pain relievers. And when that happens, one is given the ultimate but heavenly zap to deaden the pain sensors.

When one zapped this way, there is no bargaining with the sane though dreamy process of artistic creation. One simply drops out. Not creating not thinking. Zapped out of this world. 

Thus, this writer jumbles lessons learned. Thus, she unlearns.

That sometimes she eats more than her share not because she wants to, but because she can’t help herself. The pleasure of stuffing the self full makes up for the absence of any other pleasures. That chewing food to mashed-potato-fineness is much too time-consuming especially when people around are crabby-minded, stepping on heads all the way to the top of the pile.  How can one love the neighbors when one has no energy left to even love the self? If God loves, He’ll surely understand the snub of one’s self and neighbors. Anyway, may panahon na darating for everything, for everyone, di ba? 

That, sa kalilingon, one may never get to leave the homeplace mentally and emotionally. With kalilingon, kababalik, one can become the most frequent, the most at-home balikbayan.  

That because one is a confirmed idealist and a perfectionist, one expects and demands too much from the self and others beyond reason; and because of this, one gets tagged as the most demanding person within the immediate and far-flung vicinity.

That one has voted rightly and honestly, but if so, one seems to belong to the rare vanishing specie. The rest keep treating their votes as the cheapest commodity around, to be traded for less than a week’s worth of groceries. And never mind the rest.

That one can forget if one really put mind and self into forgetting. Who can still remember Ninoy Aquino’s “the Filipino is worth dying for”? Are we still debating Jose Rizal’s real mind set  the week before his death? Was Gregorio del Pilar given any other choice other than to guard-to-the-death Aguinaldo’s retreating back? Was Bonifacio and his brother sentenced to death or murdered in cold blood?        

Forgetting is easier, and damn more convenient than forgiving. But more damn are the followers who endlessly feed the fire of disorder and discontent, when their dreams of ambition, power and wealth are tied to their leader’s dreams of the same. To these people, the true meaning of ang tunay na paglilingkod sa bayan at mamamayan is unheard of, unknown. Just words to be mouthed.

To Feelings, words are not simply mouthed. They are diamonds gathered in the rough, processed in the mind, polished in the heart, and let-go by the combined workings of the lips, the tongue and the teeth. Or writing, tapping fingers.

True jewels.

(For past columns, click http://sundaypunch.prepys.com/archives/category/opinion/feelings/)

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