There was an episode in FRIENDS where Joey claims that putting The Shining by Stephen King in the freezer makes him feel safer from all its scary clutches. Then he goes on to put the Little Women in the freezer at a point where things get too sad for him. At the time, I just laughed at Joey for being his usual silly self, but thinking about it now, I realize that he may be onto something.
Personally, I am grateful for the internet and the archive of memories it provides. I often visit the Memories page of my social media accounts, just like how elephants return to the sites of the dead to examine the bones of who are no longer with them. I do this to check up on my heart. If I don’t feel any pain or guilt or regret, then I breathe more easily knowing that I am moving forward.
The past five years had been nothing short of a roller coaster ride. There were ups and downs, but there were moments of stillness, too. I never pictured to uproot my entire life from the Metro and embark on a journey of ambiguity. As a strong Capricorn ascendant, every move must be precisely anchored on a purpose—and moving towards uncertainty was almost indistinctly unimaginable.
I wrote, before, about my decision to move back home in 2019. I talked about the brief moment of peace when the airplane landed. And I also talked about how the anxiety rose rapidly questioning the entire thought process of my decision making and choices.
(https://opinion.inquirer.net/120902/from-city-lights-to-island-life)
It is easy to look at it in a privileged lens. I had enough to make myself comfortable for a year or two of gallivanting much like Elizabeth Gilbert’s voyage in Eat, Pray, Love. But up until what point? Up until which destination?
Navigating around ruins has never been easy, especially for me. You see so many different possible outcomes arising from a specific point in time. Had I said yes, I would have been married in Madrid. Had I questioned the integrity of Laksa in Vietnam, I would have probably made it to Singapore. But those were too many maybes, even for me.
I recently recorded a video greeting of myself for a fellow communications coach who is about to get married in April. I remembered how I was the second person to know that she was pregnant at the time. I remember everything from that night.
We were outside the busy and loud smoking compound in Eastwood contemplating about the “next logical step”. We were sure about the future of raising the kid, but was not quite comfortable with the notion of settling down for her sake. Of course, looking back at it now, it is a exuberant wonder how we have been stubbornly apprehensive about the outcome.
Reader, I bring no magical incantation or affirmation of what the future would look like. I am only certain that at times when the road ahead seems dark that taking a wrong turn would probably make all the turns wrong, all you can do is to take the next right step. It doesn’t matter what it is as long as you move forward—fall forward. All you need is an irrevocable, irreverent, invincible belief that after taking the leap, the net is going to appear.
The key is that you’ve got to identify the best, worthiest thing that you love most, and then build your life right on top of it—and don’t budge from it. And if you should someday, somehow get curved out of your course by either great letdown or great triumph, then your job is to fight your way back to that life the only way that it has ever been done—by putting your head down and performing with diligence and devotion and reverence whatever the task is that life is calling forth from you next.
You just do that, and keep doing that again and again and again, and I can absolutely promise you, from long personal experience in every aspect, I can assure you that it’s all going to be okay.
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