Stop, look and listen

Just last week, on my way to work one early morning, a nice sticker on the jeepney I was on caught my eye. Now, that isn’t very unusual, because I ride in a jeepney everyday (I have for as long as I can remember), and we all know how typically colorful our favorite modes of public transportation can get, with all those stickers and brightly reflectorized decorations that constantly remind us to “beware of pickpockets” and pay “barya lang po sa umaga”. So no, it isn’t unusual to notice the tacky, although culturally iconic, glaring signage.

But the sticker wasn’t even particularly conspicuous. It wasn’t like the usual that boldly screamed for attention and stirred amusement. It was just a bunch of unremarkable cut out letters glued to the leather interiors. But the message they all formed together was nonetheless striking. It was a verse from the Bible, a fairly common verse I’ve heard and read and recited (and sang, even) so many times in the past. It read “Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest”.

Although all my years of education (as in all grueling, sixteen of them) were spent in conservative, private Catholic schools, I can’t say I’m a very religious person. Spiritual, yes. I can say I have a very deep, almost visceral personal connection, a spiritual umbilical cord of sorts, to the Divine. I whisper little prayers every chance I get. But I can’t claim to be religious at all, even if it were for the dear life of me. I seldom find the sincerity, necessity, and sanctity of the rituals and dogmas religions mandate. Religion is one of the enigmatic things in this short, so far unexceptional life of mine that I am still yet to figure out and truly understand and embrace. But I appreciate it. Most of the time.

Still, I didn’t expect that commuting and noticing the small wonders of public transit on a perfectly fine morning would send me a subliminal message, perhaps another ingenious wake up call from this very creative universe. I didn’t expect something so trivial would send me spiraling down the inner depths of my mind, contemplating on things I never have any success at comprehending. As if I had just bumped my head on something really hard and emerged awake from amnesia, I realized something I had known all along the past few months but kept trying to bury at the back of my head. I labor and I am very much heavily laden. And I need to have some rest.

Since the year started I’ve been relentless at pursuing my goal, which is to make the most out of what I have and what is in store for me, to find happiness in whatever it is I do and to make this the best year ever. Maybe I bit off more than I can chew. I’ve had wonderful success so far (and much progress is at hand, too), but I’ve had to pay much in exchange as it all came at a great price. Not even the commissions I earned could afford to pay it off. I vacantly watched as time flew by, waving goodbye at me as it left me behind, slumped and toiling at my workstation to achieve what I had (foolishly) set out to do.

Now I feel tired, like an age old monument, I imagine, standing motionless and tarnished by the harsh elements as the world around me continued to move on and change. Without me. I’m bored and burnt out, stagnant and rotting in a very bad place. I feel like I’ve nothing left to give. I don’t even have anything left to draw upon, like a well that’s empty and dry. And I need the time to fill myself up again. It doesn’t come all the time, I guess, this feeling of being so dangerously close to completely burning out. But it comes. And I think it just came, knocked on my wide open door and gave me a big warm hug. My mind is so aged and fatigued it can no longer function the way it normally does, like a sophisticated cellphone submerged in a glass of ice-cold whiskey, like a precious tonsil surgically estranged from the lymphatic system and preserved for posterity’s sake in a bottle of formaldehyde. My body is, well, it’s always been a rusty old piece of machinery, anyway, so it’s not a big surprise that it’s now breaking down like a thick slab of butter melting in a hot, stainless steel skillet. My soul, my poor old soul, wants to just evaporate and vanish into thin air, even just for a while, if only to momentarily stop existing and leave behind the pains of arduous reality. If Descartes says “Cogito ergo sum” or “I think therefore I am”, then perhaps if do the exact opposite, if I shut my brain down and stop thinking altogether, I would stop existing, too. What a relief that would be. But I can only sleep for so long, and the only other real alternatives are death or lying in a comatose, both of which are rather grim and unattractive prospects.

If only my life were a movie playing in some big old fashioned VCR (I prefer vintage as technology tends to harass you with so many intellectual demands), I would gladly press the remote control’s pause button right now and just rest. I want to make the world play statue dance all at the same time, with me telling when it’s time to dance like there’s no tomorrow and when it’s time stop and just be still and motionless. At the moment I’m so confused about what I really want to do, wading in deep waters of ambivalence. With the kind of disorganized life I am living right now, finding serenity, clarity and lucid moments is hard. It’s so hard to try to change when everything around you remains the same, and it’s so hard not to change when everything around you is. It can get really confusing at times, living a life and trying your best to be good at it.

But I’ve now come to a realization, thanks to that nice little sticker I happened to notice by some big cosmic coincidence. I need some rest. I’m now learning to let go of whatever little control I have over my life (there isn’t much of it to begin with anyway), consciously trying to taper off my obsessive compulsive habit of always making mountains out of molehills, sweating the small stuff, fretting over every minute detail and worrying about the consequences of the smallest of my actions. I’m learning to loosen up, relax, be a bit careless, even, just to keep from killing myself with all the panicking I’ve been doing. I’m learning to take each day as it comes, not forcing things to happen and instead entrusting them to the powers that be, to the universe and whoever is in charge of it. I’m now embracing my nothingness, releasing my command over my life and hoping for life to surprise me with wonderful things I don’t expect.

Maybe I’ll find the answers if just take the time to stop, look, and listen. Life, after all, is a journey, not a destination. It's a big journey with so many unexpected detours. It’s time I learned to let go of the compass, the map, the worry and just sit back and just go along with this big joyride we're all in. It’ll all be over before we know it, anyway.