When New Years Are Gone

Like the leaves of an old calendar, memories fade and fly away with the passage of time. There are events not long ago that cannot be revisited anymore. There are stories beyond remembering. They are in a file that consciousness could not retrieve.

What favorite scenes in your childhood are now sealed in the chamber named forgotten? Of course you cannot answer because amnesia has gotten the better of them.

Such, are some fragments of history that have helped form our present. Such, are cherished moments in the past that try as you may, are already beyond capture.

I sometimes ask what New Year celebration in the past strikes most. Hard to say. Each one would always be the same. It is thought to bring something new, but ushers more of the same.

The stroke of midnight slithers to the first hour of the new day. What leap in time has happened? What divide has been bounded?

Hey it’s New Year! Yeah, the seconds tick towards the dead of the night then erupts in mass ecstasy, so short and ephemeral it easily fizzles unto the quiet break of dawn.

The burst of revelry, the explosion of fireworks, and what else humans can do herald the anticlimax. They do not climax, because too many times of doing the expected have made it banal, like waking up in the morning to the same sky framed by the old familiar window.

Why New Years are not the best remembered is obvious. They fortuitously become an insignificant flash in the time continuum, a human-marked point of shift to another cycle that blurs to nothingness.

Even the havoc on lives and property wrought by firecrackers and accidental firing stops to matter so soon. Things have become predictably repetitive that the burned, injured, decapitated and just shocked have a dull reception waiting at hospitals ahead of schedule.

The millennium crossover in 2000 once stood out. Billions of folks throughout the world made much of the imaginary divide. They strove to pin great meaning to a switch of two one-thousand years.

Visualize a thousand years of religion infused into human social history cutting off like a capsule of a rocket ship, and vanishing into the cosmos. But no matter how, it could not be frozen in eternity. In a little while, humanity would leave the sensation and go back to religion and the same old reality.

The counting of hours and days proceeds with a future to worry about. Humans do not have a way of untangling from the past, the lens in which they see the future. The ghost of a time gone haunts them in a state of non-existence recognized as tomorrow.

So this is what the New Year is about: tomorrow in the sights of yesterday. For tomorrow does not appear as tomorrow. It appears as experience waiting to happen again, a reality that is but a dream, for to become truly real it must be the present.

To be truly real, it must be undergone, and thereby cease being a future. It must also be an experience no longer in the past, but in the here and now.

Can you make it your resolution to have no more New Year’s resolutions? Only New Year reflections. Can you care no more to see the future, more so from the lens of the past? Only to open doors to knowing and learning afresh.

Memory is the flaming cylinder of the trajectory streaking in the outer space above the speed of sound. Once fired off, it detaches and disappears into the celestial ranges. But if encountered yet again, stare not at its core, for it will look back with hypnotic spell to lull the unwary to a dream-like stupor.

Imagine time being abolished by a new charter of man. There are no more hours, days and years. There are only changes, the coming and going of phenomena, physical and spiritual matter in a flux, things vanishing and becoming in the plain of the permanent present.

Folks do not mark a year as new or old. They do not have anything to do with any year at all anymore. There is no end, only transition. Consciousness now perceives the aspect of eternity.

History won’t be written again by avowed witnesses merely wanting the people to see it their way. It will be removed from the simple chronology of events, and interpretation in accordance with someone’s biases and intentional misconceptions.

No one will have misgivings anymore. No one will excruciate in the graveyard of the dead past. History will no longer be a piece of writing within the covers of a thick book. It will be no other than the living reality of the masses shaping the present constantly achanging.

When life is not measured anymore by the pages of the calendar, or subjected to the hands sweeping around the clock’s dial, mankind will be out of the time divides. With such, the psycho-physical benefits will be tremendous this space is too miniscule to write them.

Pressure for one will stop knocking on one’s door or waking up someone in the morning who is enjoying his prolonged detachment. Deadlines will cease to nag. Urgency along with its tensions will keep quiet. Schedules will desist from turning the hounded into nervous wrecks.

The giant waves of revelers all over the globe will save breath from not blowing horns, eardrums from not dragging cans on streets, fingers from not lighting firecrackers, and a beating heart from the silence of one powerful blast nobody expects or wants to snuff an ill-fated welcome of the New Year.

The Countryman In The Cusp Of Change

Bimz Kab

All in a day! The doctor sighed. There is still time to write Mi Ultimo. There is still time to paint the chill of a fiery dawn.

Fervent thoughts raced as minutes flew. Which is the one to capture in the flitting moments? Confusion could not be denied. A mild panic scratched the calm of the man. Tomorrow is a terrible day. Who can change it?

The land awaits the birth of a nation, he should not fear change. The mother principle has conceived the child, and no force could already prevent its arrival. Uncanny how the evening looked like tomorrow’s great hope. What they were going to execute was more of their old rule than his apostasy.

The eve of a man’s death was heralding a new life. No power could defy it anymore. What folly of the oppressors to force it. In the morning one temporal existence will go. But a new beginning for the people who have long languished under oppression was as sure to come as his end.

The doctor healed not only the sick. He has begun to treat society afflicted with cancer. He has sought to knock out darkness and fear and invigorate his fellow countrymen with a sense of greatness in collective identity. By that he turned a misconceived inferior race into an angry one.

The alien tumour was due to be excised in the course of future events. Surgery by a social upheaval was at hand. El Filibusterismo II was nearing the cataclysmic finish to an order.

Implanted still in the womb of the old society, change has taken a life of its own. The islands were awakening, morphing into a skein of force poised to unleash a deathblow to the tottering order. The revolution was already in unstoppable progress.

But how the doctor avoided the word! Instead of revolution, he chose reform. Instead of nation, he used fatherland. Though he helped the masses grip the idea of the islands’ radical break with the past, though he shared in the conception of the nation, he balked at its birth.

Dr. Jose Rizal was not prepared for two things: a land turning into war, and a people rising into self-rule and nationhood. He excruciated at the crossroads of history, refusing involvement. Had he accepted the uprising and even heeded the call to sit as head of the revolutionary councils, the archipelago would have rendezvoused with a different fate. Another die would have been cast.

Accepting instead a destiny minted by the oppressors, the doctor separated himself from the mainstream of change. Independence was dawning. Political solidarity was sweeping the islands. He pleaded his cause with the rulers.

The soon to be martyr yet preferred to stay in the cold grip of the night hoping colonialism will vanish of its own. But it did not let him see the fullness of the next day.

Darkness tried to extinguish his light. But the flame of awakening which he ignited all the more grew like a flame mistakenly doused with gasoline. His extinguishing at the Bagumbayan field stoked collective anger. The simmering coals leaped into gigantic fires. Soon a conflagration engulfed the archipelago.

The betrayal of the citizen of the world who chose to be colonial subject to the end hastened the demise of colonialism in these parts. For this, the doctor would turn out yet the better countryman. The people revered him even when he differed.

With him at the helm, the making of history could have been piloted to a more desirable outcome. But he was not in the position to marshal the course. He seemed to be avoiding risking his legacy, which the blood of martyrdom would purify. This was the awakening of a Filipino nation, nothing more nothing less .

In life, Dr. Rizal pulled his countrymen away from insurrection. How history pivots on the stupidity of rulers. It was stupid to murder a subject who until the end would not have anything to do with the plot to topple them.

As divine plot would have it, the meting of his death pushed the ouster of colonial rule vigorously like never before. With that he rested. Morir es descansar. To die is to rest. Death also rested the leading light’s steadfast refusal of revolution.

One of the great historical paradoxes would seize the moment again. The doctor did not renounce allegiance to Spain. He renounced the idea of revolution giving due course to nationhood. He was not for severance and war against the masters. But they cut him, thus fuelling the flames of rebellion.

A people about to rise up in arms held him as a guiding light. But Rizal was only for reengineering the colonial order into a new ruler-subject relationship based on fair governance, justice, participation and few liberties. With his execution, the tearing of cedulas proceeded.

Like the Katipunan founder and revolutionary leader Andres Bonifacio, the intellectual Rizal could have been the first head of a newly born republic. But the destiny of the two converged in violent death. The former by treachery of his countrymen, the latter by treachery of the country he pledged allegiance to.

They were not to taste liberation and self-destiny. They were only to embed the gene of a future charted by the shedding of blood for freedom. They were saved from its disheartening outcomes.  

When It's Time To, Quit

Has there been a moral lesson or message of a story that advises to quit? It seems unthinkable. 

Well, the folk ballad Gambler sang by Kenny Rogers says so. The lyrics goes: "You've got to know when to hold on, know when to fold on, know when to walk away, no when to run." 

There is just an instance in life's many battles when the better option is to quit and run. When the going is no longer a happy one, cease. 

Do you just toss from one turbulent strait to another, pass from yesterday’s failure to today’s, and carry nothing more than a tiresome existence every day? Then the only better way is to call off and cool down. 

So, what does that actually mean? Does it mean ending life, or to be blunt about it, committing suicide? 

Think about it. Doing a harakiri is not quitting, but insisting to solve the problem the wrong way. The one who takes his/her life still wants to wrestle with the same problem up to the last breath.

The gambler advises: "You never count your money, when your sitting at the table, there'll be time enough for counting when the dealing's done." 

To quit is to stop sitting at the table and have noting anymore of the dealing. It is to no longer respond to the challenge, just fold up, and walk away. 

Don’t think it is giving up life, or stopping to expect results. it is giving yourself a new leash on life, and expecting different results than the ones you no longer want.

I have had my share of bad luck, and times are when it just comes aplenty. I have had moments of defeat or fall when recovery was neither an option or possibility. In those times, anxiety often turns to fright over the thought that you're gonna stay there forever.

As frustration lapses into a slow choking depression, awakening jolts me: the default command called life ordering to beat it. How? Simple. Stop thinking of getting back. Quit striving to recover.

Sometimes you are pained by the feeling of being worthless, for not achieving something. But when you stop dwelling on your usual sense of achievement, you are actually paving the way to outcomes never thought of. You achieve things beyond expectation.

I have found out that in imminent defeat, the best luck comes with the option to fight no more. It may not be the great generals’ idea of brilliant strategy. But the purpose is to win yet in another battle by taking the quickest way out.

When the tide is turning against you, to abandon the battlefield is to fight yet in others. When the old beaten route is already full of obstructions and treacherous holes, get off. Reach your destiny via a different one. 

When you have lost track and the stars are no longer up there to guide you, when you no longer see the familiar skylines, and when you seem to be going farther and farther away from the old bearings, that is when you have arrived at a new haven.

After the fears, you open your eyes to a world never hitherto explored. And you stumble into the joy of experiencing new ways of living.

Delimit the possible. Set the sails towards the uncharted waters. It is when there are no other choices anymore that the only one you have must be the best choice. Quit picking.

The journey may be worthier than any destination. Embark on it and behold magnificent panoramas and horizons not shown before. Meet the fresh situations of existence.

Be not afraid to get lost. There is always a path where you find joy and happiness without setting goals or planning how to get there. The finest journey can be the one unplanned.