My Blog

August 30, 2005

Dove Reunion

I met up with my teammates from Dove. Alex cooked food for all of us, and the brand team was there (Alex, myself, Trina, Irene, Charles, Neil, Cherry, Ms Bambs,  Ayra, Dimple). The laughter was quick and lasting, and friendships were renewed that night. It was fun to reminisce about Dove.

I think we’re all thankful for that experience in our lives, when we all worked together to make something really wonderful. I think the brand was an excuse to share ourselves with each other, be with each other, take care of each other.

I was looking at everybody, and I was happy to see that everybody was really growing and blooming. In some parts I felt I wasn’t growing as quickly, or perhaps as much as my friends in Dove.

I know for a fact that Medicine is really where I want to be. That’s something I know is real and true. But at times I get impatient with the wait.

Lord, help. At times when I see my friends successful and moving ahead with their careers I feel envious. Envious because I know I was part of that group, and that I could have been moving ahead with them had I simply stayed.

But I know deep down that that kind of life is not for me. I know it. I’ve been there. And I know I will look for ways to serve others. I know that this path, however long and arduous it is, is the right one for me. I’m just getting impatient at times.

Neil reminded me to ‘enjoy the journey as much as the destination’. I think I’ve been too focused on what lies ahead that I forget that the journey is as important as the destination. I realize that the relationships I build now are most important.

I need to love this part of my life, too. Not just where I’m headed. I need to love the gifts God has granted me.

I have committed to live in love. This life, this time of my life, is important and has purpose.

Confessions of a Late Bloomer

December 31, 2002

11:14 pm

Love. I yearn for it so yet I know so little about it.

The majestic tide of romantic love. I have never been swept by its crests, never been borne by its waves. I have just watched ‘Moulin Rouge’. I feel the ache of longing so sharply in my chest I do not know how to let it go.

Will it ever happen to me? Will someone love me so much that I will mean the world to her? That my love will be enough?

As soon as I wrote that I know my love will never be enough. Somehow a love higher than my own, more infinite than the endlessness of my love, should bind us together in the meaninglessness of the world. In that all encompassing love the meaningless world is given meaning. In a world of despair, love is a shining light of hope that pierces through the darkest of nights to divide nothingness into life.

Which is why this is my prayer: that the Infinite bless me with love, so that through me, His love can forcefully be channeled to some One. And that we, she and I, be swept away by the deluge of overpowering meaning, of irresistible love.

December 27, 2000

Five years ago, contemplating hell. Is it there?

The circle has not ended, although at times I feel that it has.  There are times, embarrassing as they may be for me, that I forget lessons learned in the past. I forget the lessons that have made me strong, that have forged me into the kind of human being I am now.  In a delirious spiraling of despair I smack once more against that wall, wanting, needing, and sadly rediscovering that I have blindly hit a wall I’ve hit before. The rediscovery of another one of life’s previous gems is not as euphoric as when you discover it the first time.  The unsettling feeling that I’ve been here before mixes with the disappointment I feel for being here again. I realize that I do not have to pass through hell again to know what heaven is, but at the same time a chilling realization envelops me: hell is becoming frighteningly familiar.

               What is hell? For many years I have grappled with that question, with a serious heart asking in the throes of despair where hell is so I would know whether I am already there.  I have asked it countless of times: walking alone in the shadows of my personal dungeons, contemplating evil in a society becoming more and more devoid of meaning, or simply in times of lucid thought while riding a bus home.  The mere questions are painful, motivated by foretastes of hell I experience in my everyday life. 

               What is hell? Hell is lacking meaning. Hell is going through life without knowing genuine love. Hell is not loving completely without your entire heart and soul. Hell is finding my sole worth in the possessions I own. Hell is asking again and again why the world is already contented with the answers that it gives. Hell is isolation.

               This is where I rediscover a truth about hell that has terrified me at times and has inspired indiffirent grunts in other times. Hell is being away from God. Terrified because what kind of world is one that is away from God? Indifferent because in times of existential angst I answer simply: so what?

Steps overlooking the pond

Run Run Shaw Building

Hongkong University

February 7, 2003

I have to admit that I’m scared. Life has never been this difficult to live. The decision that I’m about to make, the person that I’m choosing to be–I sometimes have the feeling that everything depends on this choice, this moment. I’m scared. 

And sometimes I feel alone. I wonder if others are going through this crisis, like me, as intensely and as earth-shattering. It sometimes feels that this loneliness is intensely personal. Who would care if I made the wrong decision? No one as much as me, perhaps.  Is everyone just impatiently waiting for me to make up my mind and decide?

It usually starts with a prayer, and then some hope.

Feb 29, 2004

1115 pm

I find it hard to write. I have lost practice. My mind is rusty, my hands suddenly unfamiliar to write what my mouth wishes to speak to you. The flashes of brilliance, the light continually present – both seem to have dimmed.

Habit. Deed. I have not done much that I’ve been proud of. In fact, in all honesty I might have remained emotionally stagnant, or perhaps even retrogressed.

I have reached the bottom the past few years. I have made many, many mistakes. I have not grown to be a friend to myself, and maybe even to others.

My spiritual growth has slowed down. I have less felt yearning for You, O Jesus, now that I feel somewhat hollow.

So many things have changed. Perhaps it is not right to say that I’ve progressed so little. I think You have been instrumental in inspiring the knowledge of myself I know have: knowledge that I am not sure I would have had had you not led me to where I’ve been for the last couple of years: at work. The degree of self-awareness I now possess is great indeed: I know so much more of my motivations, my inner desires, my passions, my follies, my weaknesses than ever before. Yet still so much remains shrouded in mystery. So much remains silent and dark. Still so much has been given light.

I can now honestly say I understand what motivates me, and what does not. I can now tell what I care about, what I intend to dedicate my life to, how much I love. I understand who I am relative to my desires and my passions – how I am ruled by them, and how I can only truly be myself if I respect them.

I understand that my life has to be dedicated more to service than to self-gain. I do not understand why this is so but I realize that it must be so. I have enough self-knowledge—most especially over the last four years, beginning in third year college—to understand that the desires of my heart come before any decisions of my mind regarding preserving myself and my interest. A part of me was saddened before by this realization—I no longer can unflinchingly run after my dreams of extremely ostentatious material gain with regard for nothing else—yet a larger part was gladdened. Liberated, in fact, was my feeling. I understood finally that while both were important to me, one was more crucially linked to my happiness. Therefore priorities were set. Realizations were made. Decisions allowed to help order my life.

And now I embark upon something new. Yes I am afraid. I am scared. And a part of me remains needful of the material affirmation I know the path I’ve left will give. Yet I have profound sense of peace. A quiet faith in the life I will lead ahead. A belief in the rightness of my choice. I feel peace. Like a lover sure of the love of his woman. Or of a son whose hand tightly grips that of his father’s in a busy urban street.

Suddenly I realize that a while ago I had nothing to write about. But now I have so many. I was scared that the silence and quiet of heart and mind that I needed to be inspired to write truthfully would be difficult to coerce back into myself. Now I feel thankful that they came to rest on me so quickly and so peacefully. I am now in more familiar territory. In a place I’ve known before, in a wonderful setting of cold night breezes and clear thoughts.

It’s nice to be in this place again, after so long. You have allowed me to remember, O Lord. And so quickly. And effortlessly. I was afraid to sit down and start writing because I thought I would end up disappointed. I realize that the fear is greater than the writing. I am happy. Grant me peace, O lord.  You alone are my hope.

I look forward to tomorrow. I look forward to begin writing about my dreams again.

Be a fan of failure. Failure’s hard, but success is far more dangerous. If you’re successful at the wrong thing, the mix of praise and money and opportunity can lock you in forever. Failure is how you eliminate the wrong turns on the way to the right one. Follow your deams. Never give up. Believe in yourself.

– wisdom from a movie I scribbled down on a piece of paper

Something that started out as a prayer more than a year ago, when I asked myself, "What will they see?"

August 23, 2004

12:20 AM

I am unsure what others would see if they pieced together my life from the things I’ve left behind. Will they see a good person, a person who strove hard, who worked hard, who loved with a passion?

Or will they see someone who trusted well, but whose doubts loomed large underneath? Or someone who loved much, but whose fears crippled much as well? Someone who has surpassed a great deal, but who constantly feels he hasn’t surpassed himself? Someone who threw himself at life with wild abandon, but who shirks and hides when he can, when the noise explodes and oppresses? Someone who can be a great philantrophist, but only because he started living life with selfish desires that was exceeded by generosity only much, much later?

Someone who loves much and is hopeful that the size of his fears are smaller than the size of his love. Someone who laughs much because his tears are likewise many, whose desires are great only to surpass his great indifference.

When they see this life I have lived, the bits and pieces of it I have strewn in many, many directions, will they see how I have struggled to live an extraordinary life in the face of what I feel to be my own ordinariness? Or will they see that I have only tried to survive, and live this life well, and sought only to understand why I’m here and where I wish to go?

Will they see someone who gets distracted by the mundane, or someone whose eyes and heart are set on the divine, seeking to better this hand he was dealt with? Or will they see someone whose heart was always discouraged, whose shoulders always sagging with the weight of his burdens, whose spirit was time and time again dragged down into the muck of his own self-criticism?

Will they see his failures and admire his capacity to rise up again, or will they see the heart bruised and battered, crying out in anguish, desiring with all its will no longer to keep up the fight?

Will they see that heart that loved well, or will they see the heart that cried much, hurt much, was spurned much, and felt much pain?

Will they see someone who gained wisdom and spent his life knowing much, or will they see the mind that forgot much, most of all many many important lessons whose meanings could have spared him much, much pain? Will they see in him the sagacity of the old, or the recklessness and the wicked pain of the young?

I am now here, faced with my life, and I feel the need to gather my strength and once more plow the fertile yet seemingly unyielding land ahead of me. I feel the need to understand my reasons, to understand them really well, and to never forget them.

I feel the need to gather my mind with my spirit and my body, and fortify them with strength and discipline. I feel the need to go back to the simplicity of my desires, to the desire of my heart: I want to become a doctor.

Today I saw a baby being revived from near death. It was gray, barely crying. I remember having wondered in the past whether newborn babies in distress really do appear blue or gray. Whenever I would read about babies appearing gray I would always dismiss that as exaggeration. But medicine is truly complex and simple at the same time, and at that moment, there was no other way of describing the baby more simply than by describing it as that: she was gray.

The baby was quiet. It had been rushed into the room and placed hastily and almost carelessly on the warming surface. It was barely moving, and numerous flicks to its leg did not rouse it. Its eyes were shut, and it was hardly breathing. It seemed to me that it was exhausted, too tired to breathe, too tired to live.

I could feel the tension in my chest. We were there simply to see the facilities and familiarize ourselves with the department; we were to do nothing else. I looked at the doctor. The doctor was outwardly calm, but it was likely that she was tense as well, seeing that losing the baby was a distinct probability. She inserted a tube into her mouth to suck off the meconium lodged in her throat, and perhaps even in her trachea and her lungs. I watched with growing panic while the baby remained blue. I was scared, and felt a friend grip my shoulder and arm. My friend was scared, too.

The doctor did not give up. She started pumping the baby with air through an ambu bag. It felt like she was doing the procedure for half an hour, when in fact it probably was no longer than 2 minutes. All this time I was afraid that the baby would die.

And then I saw the baby cry. That was a good sign, because I sighed in relief as I saw color quickly flooding into the baby’s body. The baby started to move and kick, and was flailing its arms about. I let out a breath I did not realize I was holding the entire time. I left the baby sure that it was going to be ok. My walking was slowed, my mind preoccupied with what I just witnessed. I felt that this an important moment, significant. I needed some time by myself.

Medicine is full of those moments when reflecting about life and burrowing deep into one’s soul is appropriate, needed, if only to relish the richness of life. To be confronted with the very raw truths of life and living, to know what, in the end, truly matters. I realized that very many times, the hospital—my future place of work—will be where life begins and where it ends. I feel I need to be prepared to be part of that cosmically profound environment.

I am glad to be doing this reflection: I am afraid that if I do not do this, if I do not reflect and understand the meaning of what I am going through as they happen, meaning will slip through and disappear beneath my demystified view of life. I will no longer ask questions about life. Questions like, if life was more than a person’s body, then why does it slip away if I stand back and do nothing? Why would a baby die if a doctor does not help? Mystery will soon be diminished by knowledge, my sense of awe deadened by seeing a miracle occur countless of times a day.

And it has started. In the

OB

wards seeing numerous patients receiving health care in the Philippine General Hospital, I feel that I am slowly beginning to accept that this is how things should be. I am beginning to tell myself that this is already the best we could do, the best we could offer, and the best that the poor deserve. By this I mean the crowded wards, the unsanitary environment, the facilities threatened by age, patients endangered by infection. By this I mean the poverty of PGH, the poverty of its patients, redeemed only by the sincerity of its doctors and staff.

Poverty is humbling. I see in the eyes of the doctors and the staff of PGH the sincere desire to help. Many may argue that if it is there, then it must be hidden underneath layer upon layer of cynicism and fatalism. That this is what PGH can offer: take it or leave it.

I can accept that this is the best we can offer right now. I refuse to accept, however, that things should remain the same. I still believe we can uplift the lives of so many more Filipinos.

Seeing the squalid conditions of the hospital I squirmed at the realization that for many, many Filipinos, this is where life truly begins. The less than ideal surroundings, but the abundance of heart and dedication to see life through. For the baby that was roused from its deadly sleep, she was not saved by poverty but by the big heart of the doctors reviving her, prodding her to hope amidst her poverty. I hope I can be one of those doctors someday. But at the same time, I hope I can be part of a larger goal: to serve Filipinos by uplifting and empowering them to no longer be poor.

Septmeber 19, 2005