detachment

"Learn to detach...Don't cling to things, because everything is impermanent... But detachment doesn't mean you don't let the experience penetrate you. On the contrary, you let it penetrate fully. That's how you are able to leave it... Take any emotion--love for a woman, or grief for a loved one, or what I'm going through, fear and pain from a deadly illness. If you hold back on the emotions--if you don't allow yourself to go all the way through them--you can never get to being detached, you're too busy being afraid. You're afraid of the pain, you're afraid of the grief. You're afraid of the vulnerability that love entails. But by throwing yourself into these emotions, by allowing yourself to dive in, all the way, over your head even, you experience them fully and completely. You know what pain is. You know what love is. You know what grief is. And only then can you say, 'All right. I have experienced that emotion. I recognize that emotion. Now I need to detach from that emotion for a moment."


Mitch Albom, from Tuesdays with Morrie

feeling senti

I was in Cebu from August 18 to 21 for a workshop on quality management system as our office is angling for ISO 9001:2008 certification by year end. We stayed at Golden Prince Hotel and Suites, just a hundred paces or so from Ayala Mall.

My friends, upon knowing I was where I was, sent text messages, urging me to dine at The Terrace (this one’s beautiful!) and raid Fully Booked (this one’s even more beautiful!). I went to The Terrace and Fully Booked alright, but no dining and raiding happened! For sure there were some covers, mostly by Filipino authors, that caught my eyes but I held on to my hard-earned money knowing I have gazillion unread titles stashed somewhere in my room. I bought six back-issues of My Home, though.

Ahh, but I bought shirts and jeans. Shoes and watch, too! I just realized that for over five years now I haven’t done some serious shopping for myself. (How did I survive those years? Through the benevolence of friends outside the country and yes, the ever dependable "UK" vintage.) And so I spent my 5-digit honorarium from a recent racket like it was a cellphone load that needed to be consumed else it expired.

But one thing bothered me that made me sad in a way that I couldn't explain. It just struck me that like Manila, Cebu no longer enthralls me. Could it be that I have come to realize that one can only eat so much lasagna and drink so much fancy coffee? No, scratch that; I don’t eat lasagna and drink fancy coffee.

Must be the eternal promdi in me because on the second day, I was already itching to go home and revert to the life I have long ago learned to love and like.



The Friday I was to fly home, I woke up early because I wanted to take a trip down memory lane. I rode a jeep and when it zipped past University of San Carlos, my heart skipped. My alma mater looked massive than when I first entered it 28 years ago, on a rainy Monday in June. As the jeep headed for Colon, I looked back, and with USC looming from a distance, I felt proud and grateful: If not for that school, I wouldn’t be confident to write this post in English!

Colon was another matter; the landscape had changed drastically that it looked different from the Colon of my time. Nostalgia hit me so bad that I would have wept if only I was not sitting next to an old woman fondling a rosary. I closed my eyes and then in a beautiful montage everything came back---Fairmart, Gazini, Happy Emporium, Brutus, Ding Haw, Cloud Nine, Gaw!

Sorry if I'm feeling senti today.

i wonder

amidst all the fuzz about tita cory's death and funeral, i just wonder if james yap's parents were around and how did they survive it.