Get a life

By Jun Velasco

LIFE’s paradox continues to befuddle us with the gory accident at the Visayan sea with hundreds of Pinoy passengers of our local version of Titanic killed  by drowning.

You can’t blame diminutive Pangulo for fuming (please remove the “mad” — Al Mendoza) because the Sulpicio Lines carrier had been warned about the approaching typhoon before it sailed at sea.

The nightmarish accident has shaken our conscience and brought to test once more our faith in a loving God for allowing such a scary tragedy to happen.

But such is an unfathomable fact of life, and we can only pray for understanding to keep our faith intact.

      Let’s pray for the souls of the hundreds of victims. We are all at the mercy of   Fate, or to the faithful, God. Sulpicio’s owners who have been proclaiming their near-perfect upkeep of their ships should realize their limitations and follow the old local riddle, ”daig ng maagap ang isang masipag” (the careful always beats the industrious).

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We guested at the radio program of Baptist Pastor Arnold Badaguas at a Timog restaurant Wednesday. One of its honorees was Gen. Pol Bataoil, aside from DSWD Sec. Esperanza Cabral and Tarlac City Mayor Genaro Mendoza.

Being predominantly spiritual in its thrust, Usapang Pilipino has touched many lives in the Philippines here and abroad for   its incisive discussion of world issues with accent on the Christian dimension.

The Baptist pastors were full of good words for Pangasinenses Pol Bataoil who, they said, didn’t even mind being called any time of the night when there was a peace and order problem to solve. We thought only Pangasinenses were Bataoil’s fans.  It’s a pity that he is about to retire before his dream of becoming chief PNP is realized.

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Have you tried using the newly opened Dawel-Lucao Diversion Road?

Before the construction of the 5-kilometer road-bridge partly Japanese-funded, travel time between Lucao and Dawel took about 20 to 30 minutes.

The new infra is a continuation of the Jose de Venecia Sr. Road at the Dagupan-Calasiao boundary, which everybody thought was already a great achievement.

Credit Speaker Joe de Venecia for these two landmark projects and the DPWH led by Secretary Jun Ebdane and Director Fidel Ginez. Thank also the Japanese government which loaned us P930 million at less than l percent interest a year.

JdV really used his position as speaker fruitfully for his Dagupan birthplace, and we Dagupeños and Pangasinses are lucky beneficiaries. Dapat may monumento si JdV sa dalawang landmark infra projects na mga yan.

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Below is a graduation address delivered by Pulitzer Prize winning author, Anna Quindlen in an American university, where she was awarded an Honorary PhD. Read it if you want to get the best out of life.

 “I’m a novelist. My work is human nature. Real life is all I know. Don’t ever confuse the two, your life and your work. You will walk out of here this afternoon with only one thing that no one else has. There will be hundreds of people out there with your same degree: there will be thousands of people doing what you want to do for a living. But you will be the only person alive who has sole custody of your life. Your particular life. Your entire life. Not just the life of your mind, but the life of your heart. Not just your bank  accounts but also your soul.

People won’t talk about the soul very much anymore. It’s so much easier to write a resume than to craft a spirit. But a resume is cold comfort on a winter’s night, or when you’re sad or broke, or lonely, or when you’ve received your test results and they’re not so good.

Here is my resume: I am a good mother to three children. I have tried never to let my work stand in the way of being a good parent. I no longer consider myself the centre of the universe. I show up. I listen. I try to laugh. I am a good friend   to my husband. I have tried to make marriage vows mean what they say. I am a good friend to my friends and they to me. Without them, there would be nothing to say to you today, because I would be a cardboard cut out. But I call them on the phone, and I meet them for lunch. I would be rotten, at best mediocre, at my job if those other things were not true.

You cannot be really first rate at your work if your work is all you are. So here’s what I wanted to tell you today: Get a life. A real life, not a magic pursuit of the next promotion, the bigger pay cheque, the larger house. Do you think you’d care so very much about these things if you blew an aneurysm one afternoon, or found a lump in your breast?

Get a life in which you notice the smell of salt water pushing itself on a breeze at the seaside, a life in which you stop and watch how a red-tailed hawk circles over the water, or the way a baby scowls with concentration when she cries to pick up a sweet with the thumb and first finger.

Get a life in which you are not alone. Find people you love, and who love you. And remember that love is not leisure, it is work. Pick up the phone. Send an email. Write a letter. Get a life in which you are generous. And realize that life is the best thing ever, and that you have no business taking it for granted. Care so deeply about its goodness that you want to spread it around. Take the money you would have spent on beer and give it to charity. Work in a soup kitchen.  Be a big brother or sister. All of you want to do well.  But  if  you do not do good too, then doing well will never be enough.

But it is so easy to waste our lives, our days, our hours, and our minutes. It is so easy to take for granted the color of our kid’s eyes, the way the melody in a symphony rises and falls and disappears and rises again. It is so easy to exist instead of to live.

I learned to live many years ago. I learned to love the journey, not the destination. I learned that it is not a dress rehearsal, and that today is the only guarantee you get. I learned to look at all the good in the world and try to give some of it back because I believed in it, completely and utterly. And I tried to do that in part by telling other what I had learned. By telling them this: Consider the lilies of the field. Look at the fuzz on a baby’s ear. Read in the back yard with the sun on your face. Learn to be happy. And think of life as a terminal illness, because if you do, you will live it with joy and passion as it ought to be lived.”

(Readers may reach columnist at junmv@yahoo.com. For past columns, click http://sundaypunch.prepys.com/archives/category/opinion/think-about-it/ For reactions to this column, click “Send MESSAGES, OPINIONS, COMMENTS” on default page.)

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