Huwebes, Enero 3, 2013

Grateful Mindset


26 December 2012


There is no point in wresting with myself when it comes to writing. I will give in eventually.

I’ve been trying to sum up what Christmas is for me now. I again remember what Christmas is called in some other place – Thanksgiving - the appropriate name for me for the season. As I look back at the past year, I have lots to be grateful for.  

I am with people I would want to be with if the prediction of world destruction by December 21, 2012 were true, with the exception of my dad whom I miss. The one point about love that I have learned as an adult aside from having your thoughts fully tuned in to what the object of love is about was to also speak about that person every time and unconsciously find yourself being changed. Love is not a bug as the Jonas Brothers sang about. It is a virus which if they meant by bug as a computer bug would be more like a virus as well. I don’t know much about the difference between bugs and viruses when it comes to computers even if Dan Brown already told me so in Digital Fortress. We have to meet again sometime for confirmation but to me, love is a virus because it takes over your system and makes you different.

What I like to reiterate is that love changes you, from your thoughts, emotions, how you react to how you live. With my dad away for Christmas, I have proof, as I have observed myself, that I love him. Not just with the respectful love we reserve for parents or the adoring almost idolatrous love we give to them when we were younger and we thought our parents could do anything and that they were never wrong. I know I love my dad because I keep thinking of him. He never was the vocal type; he demonstrates his love. Because he is not with us, I keep on remembering him for himself, not for what I want him to be. Children do have an expectation for their parents. I usually lived in that dome of shade, believing that my dad was what I thought him to be and loving him for that idealized form. But I am older. I know clearly of his human attributes, what I both like, dislike, hate or am annoyed with about him. And he’s being away makes me think of all of those and wanting him to be here so I wouldn’t have to think of them as memories but to actually experience them as realities. I am longing to again neglect his presence simply because he is before me and the idea of his not being with us would only be a probability, not actuality. I would want that peace of not even getting to think that we would be apart as a family because in the now we are as one.


For that I am still grateful. I will try to live my life with a thank you, whatever comes, thank you still – I have a complete living, breathing and loving family. I would’ve wanted my Christmas 2012 to be magical, like how it was to me when I was a child. If only I could live it as I thought my ideal day should be. My concept of an ideal day would be to have it as a single day, not comparable to any other. I want to live each day as if I had no past or no future ahead of me. Even if only Christmas, living it as a separate day, as if it is the only day I would have to be alive. That sense is what there is when I am with Shiela. She makes me realize that I may not have any more morrows to have with her even if the idea of not having her alive while I still am pains me. She also instills in me the truth that now is precious to waste for thinking about the times we have missed on each other. Her condition of fragility and susceptibility, being fully under the mercy of others while being able to stand on as herself is a salve for the numbing discipline of life.


I have met amazing people through all the years I’ve lived. Through them I can see life beyond my horizons. I am still hopeful. For that I will be grateful. I will not stop myself from being grateful. I will put effort even when I am very much against being grateful at any moment, the more I would give thanks. May I own up to this vow which is really more than a labor of love or denunciation of self. The Sovereign Lord deserves it from me. I pray faithfulness for living daily as a sacrifice; He loved me first.

Walang komento:

Mag-post ng isang Komento