Nocturnal Wisdom » Thou shall not sleep at seven in the evening

I don’t know if it it’s worth writing what I have to say, because basically I am talking to a half-sleep idiot – which is myself. But I’ll say it for the two or three of you who are not. 

I only got three hours sleep last night because of watching that damn TV series “The Legend of the Seeker” which, by the way, lacks depth. After watching a few episodes I find it has a very common story plot – but I’m still planning to finish season one, and even bought season two DVD. Isn’t it idiotic? Well, still nothing beats Heroes, Lost and Prison Break.

Nocturnal wisdom

But I digress, I force myself to wake up early for work – sleepy and edgy the whole day, drink a bottle of beer at 6:00 p.m. while waiting for the heavy rain to get heavier. I felt really tired and wish that a lightning would perhaps strike that nearby tree or the radio antenna of the adjacent Paragon building – you know, just to break the damn monotony of this damn Monday. Karen Carpenter is right – rainy days and Mondays always get me down.

Expecting nothing unusual will happen today, I decided to go home and violate the bachelor’s unwritten commandment – Thou shall not sleep as early as seven in the evening. 

The annoying thing is that I wake up before midnight having these random thoughts about life. I cannot force myself to get back to sleep so I grab my laptop and decided to write my random midnight rants. 

Here’s  my self-help nocturnal wisdom:

Opportunity is not a talking peacock

I repeatedly ignore opportunity so maybe it loses its interest in me too. I now realize that opportunity is like a bird suddenly showing itself one sultry afternoon at the veranda. Because I thought it is just a common bird I see everyday, I immediately lose interest and turn my back on it. Then it spread its wings as it flew away, showing its bright and rare color hiding underneath – but of course, I missed it, because I’m impatient and turned my back on it. If I look a little longer and waited, I might saw it and be able to grab it. I beg to disagree to those who are saying that opportunities are rare; it is actually presenting itself to us everyday, the problem is how we look at it. It’s not always appearing as the flamboyant-talking peacock saying “Hey moron! I am opportunity, would you like to grab me?”

I always leave self-discipline on my pillow when I wake up

I always buy a Stradmore organizer at the start of every year. Written on the first few pages of it are the things I accomplished the previous year and what I intend to accomplish for the coming year. For the past three years I realized that I haven’t fully accomplished what I set three years ago – because I lack self-discipline. I always start a plan or project with fiery enthusiasm for a few months, only to be neglected and abandoned without any solid result. I can’t imagine what I could have accomplished if I could simply get myself to follow through on my best plans and intentions no matter what and if only I could always carry with me the art of self-discipline. 

Next time, don’t leave discipline on the pillow you bastard!

I guess I need a round of LATIGO whipping

I heard the military are the best teachers of discipline – so maybe educational institutions should include in their curriculum a one month stay in a military academy to learn about discipline? But of course, in any school even in military, they don’t actually teach the important life lessons; like discipline, attitude, and life in general. You have to learn it in the real world, in actual interaction with others and oftentimes learning it all by yourself.

So here I am, in the middle of the night, writing this nonsense and feeling stagnant.  I’ve written a number of blog post about discipline and I know I’m sounding like a crazy cricket here, repeatedly screaming meaningless and annoying noise in the middle of the night.  I guess what I need now is a round of whipping with a latigo – yes, that old trick of gaining self-discipline over our behaviors with the latigo (Filipino term for a whip).

However, self-flagellation with a latigo is a crazy 14th century practice of those obsessed Opus Dei members. Hence, I just make an acronym for LATIGO to make a convenient way to remember self-discipline.

What? An acronym for LATIGO? Yeah I know you’re probably thinking of those corny Filipino acronyms like I.T.A.L.Y. (I Trust And Love You) – I can’t believe they even make it a movie title, or C.H.I.N.A. (Come Here I Need Affection) or the worst - P.H.I.L.I.P.P.I.N.E.S. (Pumping Hot.. I Love It! Please Please.. I Need Erotic Stimulation!)

All right, all right let’s stop it. Here’s my acronym for L.A.T.I.G.O. (Lifelong Attitude Towards Initiating Goals Outstandingly)

See? I just gave my own definition of self-discipline meaning:

SELF-DISCIPLINE = LATIGO (Lifelong Attitude Towards Initiating Goals Outstandingly) 
{Applause! Applause!}
 
Ok, I’m not yet sleepy but I’ll stop this nonsense. Maybe a few pages of Umberto Eco’s Turning back the Clock and a glass of warm milk will help me get back to sleep.

…Oh shit, the milk carton is empty.

I didn’t expect comments but if you would like to drop one, I’ll appreciate it. Goodnight and Good morning folks!

Are you living your life as an adventure?

I consider my life as a continuous adventure of risk-taking, contentment and successes. But it wasn’t always that way. During high school, I sensed that there was something bigger in life – something exciting and fulfilling – but I didn’t know how to go about getting it. Growing up in a small town in Occidental Mindoro where the norm was waiting for the day to be over, I strive to have a different way of life. I try my best to be an achiever – salutatorian of my high school class, a full government scholar during college and now striving to finish Graduate school. I’m not trying to brag here, it’s just that I thought that worldly success alone would bring me what I am searching for.

But after seven years of working as an employee, I have to face the hard truth that I am not on the journey I wished and planned. Though my work was sometimes exciting, I still wasn’t living life as an adventure. I always dreamed of being a professional mountaineer, a fiction book author, professional photographer and a teacher with a PhD. However, life doesn’t always go how we wanted it to be.

Sometimes, when I lazily wake up every morning, forcing myself to work, I had these funny thoughts, with a flash of miserable lucidity, that I was just fooling myself, but I did nothing. And for many years, I did nothing but drift. Like a driven leaf, I just do everything expected or demanded of me.

The deterioration of our ambitions

I remembered a phrase by a poet or maybe a Greek philosopher I read somewhere, something like “He who desires, but acts not, breeds pestilence.” I was a mass of aspirations and dreams unacted on, of fantasies as unreal as those that awed me during childhood which was mostly spent in the farms. I always wanted to go somewhere, to travel the world perhaps, but suddenly I found myself paralyzed in a rut at the age of twenty-nine – making payments on an apartment room, receiving bonuses – (sometimes at the mercy of the management), going from my boarding house to office, to gym and back to house, going to occasional barkada out-of-town trip but mostly just imagining luxury vacations, daydreaming, escaping through books, blogging and surfing the net.

Working life itself was routine and habit: morning rush, breakfast at the office pantry, check e-mails, morning work routine, buying lunch at Lola Payat and Lola Simangot’s carinderia (that’s the name we gave to our nearby office carinderia), exchanging jokes about sex, clitorology and gossips at lunch, afternoon work routine and a quick barkada chismis before leaving office. Office friendships was surely based on that dismal reality which cost us nothing to share the workplace and life’s irony with which we viewed the mediocrity of our lives and the deterioration of our ambitions. In a company, where there is no such thing as internal career advancement but merely a training ground, we see in the other the mirror of our insufficiency. With identical correctness, we carried out our duties as employees, always voicing out the overwhelming sarcasm of our conversations - blaming HR, attacking Healthcare policies, complaining about unjustified salaries, etc. – but always never intended for a true complaint (maybe that’s how the corporate world works).

The curious case of Mang Frank

I remember Mang Frank (may he rest in peace). Funny old guy, started as a Recruitment Assistant, served a forced retirement (still in the same position) after serving almost half of his working years in this company and died broke the following year. I imagine him telling me, while sitting in front of his favorite old noisy typewriter: “Don’t get stuck in this rut, don’t let what happened to me happen to you, get out while you can – don’t cave in!”

I am hired in this company as his replacement but I actually avoided him on his last few weeks because I was so bored with the tedium of his increasingly disjointed stories, his detailed account of the intrigues and tricks he was victim of in the office and his very detailed sexual escapades. The years went by, I am just thankful I am not in that position anymore but still in the same group of companies. I go to work every morning, pay my monthly bills and trying to stretch the money till the end of every month, which is not always successful – life of a typical bachelor eh? So I was considering looking for a second job to have more savings. In this way I will not give up all the plans that seemed so courageous when I started working: preparing myself for a better career, say, university professor or researcher in some institute. But I didn’t have the time or the will, and my free evenings got away from me without me noticing.

I know what the ghost of Mang Frank would say: “What are you doing? Why haven’t you got out of here? How many more years are you going to take it?”

Once in a while I did go somewhere, but most of the time things doesn’t always go as planned. There are always set-backs and a lot of things to consider.

Life as an Adventure – One step at a time

Then it hit me. This is the adventure. This. This up and down, success and failure, back and forth – all of it is the adventure. All the time that I was looking for what I want, I was learning what it was to live a life of adventure. It wasn’t about being perfect, doing things right, receiving big salary, getting rich and having wild success with no downside. It was risking decisions, stumbling and falling short of my expectations as well as enjoying and building on my own successes.

As the famous Filipino salawikain said, “Habang maiksi ang kumot, matuto kang mamaluktot. Kung mahaba na at malapad saka na mag-unat unat” [Refers to situations when resources are scarce, one should learn to be thrift and adapt].  

My adventure was really just beginning – I’ll just have to take it, one step at a time.

 
P.S.
How about you, are you living your life as an adventure?
Are you satisfied and happy with your current situation?

Please share your personal thoughts on the Comments section below.                   

________________________________

Image credit: Desperation by Antonina

Guaranteed Life is Propaganda

Sometimes I find it hard translating my feelings into words and as far as my personal blogging experience is concerned, I find it impossible to completely convey exactly what I feel – I can’t totally overcome blogger’s-block I guess. And although my written expressions might be improving, the more I write the more I am discovering how difficult the task of laying down words really is. I’m writing a draft of a personal e-mail right now and I don’t know why I find it so hard.

Evidently, I’m having a hard time conveying the frustrations I’m feeling right now. Thinking about your career and what you really want in life is really a huge everyday burden – especially if you suddenly realize that somewhere along the way, you took a wrong turn.


Eventually, at some point, I feel the need to be on the right track. FEAR always keeps me from moving on and over time it disguise itself as HOPE.  

I accept that I'm not guaranteed anything in my life, but rather I am given the opportunity to go after what I believe to be a worthy pursuit. Because there is no guaranty of success I will appreciate it all the more when I've achieved what I have set out to accomplish.

Through hard work, keeping my end result in mind, and applying ample stick-to-it-ness I know I will achieve what I really want in life.

Am I making sense here?

Enough of my self-help rants! Back to my e-mail…

The School of Life and My Shoes

I arrived early for my job interview in Makati City and I still got two hours to kill before my scheduled time. Bad thing is I forgot to bring a book and the nearby mall is still closed so I think of something to do while waiting. I decided to take a short walk to buy a newspaper. 

Just outside the building, an old shoeshine man sitting on the sidewalk beside a newspaper stand caught my attention. He is carefully arranging his shoeshine paraphernalia like those were his prized possessions. He seemed nice and my shoes badly need a little makeover so I approached him to get my shoes cleaned. I noticed the man’s shoes were full of dusts. How ironic, I ponder how a shoeshine man never cleaned his shoes, yet I didn’t bother asking. He silently cleaned my shoes efficiently and with precision. I just sit there, just observing him, enjoying the elated feeling of being served and of being pampered and respected. I paid him, asked for my ten-peso change and stand up without even asking his name. I didn’t even say thank you. It’s his job anyway. 

The lady and the old shoeshine man

I still got plenty of time so I go to the magazine stand to buy a newspaper. I heard the shoeshine man asking a fortysomething corporate looking lady who were browsing some magazines to shine her shoes. The lady just smiled and declined. But the shoeshine man was persistent, almost pleading.

The smiling lady said something to the shoeshine man, and to my surprise, the shoeshine man stand up and sit down on his customers’ chair while the lady took his place.

I realized that the lady turned the table on this old man and offered to shine his dusty shoes – and pay him 500 pesos to do it. They both smiled and laughed while the man seemed to be excitedly telling his life’s story, as the lady sat on the ground at his feet and cleaned his dusty shoes. Some passersby looked at them bewildered. The newspaper vendor and some of his customers smiled too.

But I felt different. A wave of emotion hit me and for a moment I held back. I quickly returned to the building to read my newspaper but I can’t focus. The old man’s face, smiling as if nobody ever shined his shoes before, keeps flashing on my mind. Why did I deny that shoeshine man’s moment of joy?

I kept staring at my shining shoes – assailed by conflicting emotions, there was neither shame nor remorse.

"Change your heart!" said my shoes

To give importance, to treat others as an equal, to appreciate simple things, even if only for a moment which is very easy to give, was that lady’s gift that I will long remember every time I will wear my shoes.

It will always remind me that if we change our heart, then look at the world, the world would be a happy place to live.

By the way, I didn’t passed the job interview, but I learned an important life's lesson.  

________________________________

Photo Credit: Monica Jackson - Is That A Shoe?

Loving the Tasks That I Hate

Well, today is just another boring routine day, another SSDD (Same Shit, Different Day). Struggled to wake up, have my vegetable & fish breakfast & a cup of coffee to wake up my still sleeping nerves.

Part of my job is to act as the company-communication-whatever-goddamn-it-is. The company has this centralized e-mail & fax communication protocol. Meaning, all incoming and outgoing operational e-mails should be monitored and checked and must be properly forwarded – and the person responsible for that is no other than ME! Sometimes I love this part of my job because you got know almost everything about the company, I am always updated about crew matters, what the hell is going-on in other departments, some gossips and a truck load of nonsense – which bored me most of the time. My policy is “IF IT’S NOT MY CONCERN, I DON’T CARE.”

Therefore, every morning, I have to check a hundred e-mails, not addressed to me of course, read some of its contents and forward it to its intended recipients. Oh My Gums! It doesn’t excite me anymore. This and other nakaka-bobong work terribly bored me to death…

But I must face it. If I want to truly excel in life and discipline myself, then there are tasks that I simply must do. Some of these tasks strike me as just plain unpleasant, even painful.

Unfortunately, we are wired to avoid pain. This means that unless I change my perspective on certain Peak Performance behaviors, I will avoid them, and sabotage my own self.

On the other hand, perhaps I will do my necessary tasks, but complete them with clenched teeth, furrowed brows and irritation coursing through my body. That state is not very pleasant, and will seriously hurt my productivity.

What happens when I need to speak in that mood? I say ugly, unproductive things! Call center agents offering credit cards and other crazy unsolicited calls easily irritated me, plus some bullshitting office visitors and other obnoxious co-workers - a totally goddamned bad day.

Hmm, I realize that, to avoid this terrible day, the only solution is to LOVE THE TASKS THAT I HATE.

I must remember, it is not the task that makes my mood. It's what I tell myself about that task.

I am making the decision to look at each task for what it truly is -- the means to a greater end. I remind myself that through the accomplishment of each and every task I am moving myself closer and closer to where I want to be in life.

I am making the decision to steer my own ship rather than simply allowing life to move me from one thing to the next like a ship lost at sea. The simplest of actions, taken on an ongoing basis ensures that I will arrive at the destination I have set for myself.