What me, change?

Everybody, from spiritual leaders to modern scientists, warns us about the need to adjust to the changes happening all around. Indeed, the world is changing— and so must we.

Looking at my old photos, I’ve changed enough as it is, and, from the looks of things, I’m not going to look any better, although I like myself more.

Still, I’d have to be blind to not see that life as I knew it has changed and keeps changing. In fact, it is changing so fast I can hardly keep in step with it, and the temptation to get off, or stop trying, grows stronger; my own growing physical weakness and my electronically challenged mindset are beginning to weigh heavier and heavier on me.

Being a senior can be an excuse for anything not to go well, but a poor one. I’m managing and not doing too badly. Everyone younger tends to be stricter, even more paranoid, with me, as though they knew something I didn’t.

Reinvention

So how do I adjust and change in order to not only survive but beat this challenge? I’m told to let go of old formulas even if they worked well for me and brought me to this modestly comfortable and happy prepandemic place. I need to search, fearlessly, and discover fresh and even untried solutions. Perhaps self-change is yet too timid a way; it’s more like reinvention, if you ask me.

Life’s changes are no stranger to me; they announced themselves with golpes—knocks on the head—and I never doubted I would survive them, as I would these present ones.

But, to overcome this double whammy, we need to be together even more, caring for and helping one another, selflessly, under a sober government, and one with a vision and a plan with our best interest at heart. As fate would have it, we’ve never been so divided and with a government incapable of doing anything beyond self-interest.

Actually, it’s this government beating us in the game of reinventing oneself, one always looking to find creative and less and less democratic ways of escaping responsibility and accountability. Its idea of governance is by terrorism, and no ordinary terrorism but “Kill, kill, kill!” terrorism. And it obviously intends to perpetuate itself, for now by grooming a surrogate successor government and allowing the political participation, by intimidation, of a ruthless world power.

And we seem to be allowing ourselves our desperate hope that, like all bad things, these too shall come to pass, and we can start anew, as though nothing happened.

Many of my peers can attest that once upon a time things indeed had a way of sorting themselves out, so much so that it was almost as though we had very little to do with our own self-rescues. We waited patiently and, mostly, prayed.

But again that was then. This time we need creativity and imagination—and fast. We need to see things with new eyes and attack the current crisis with new and untried ways.

When I was in my mid40s—my parents in their 60s and my children in their 20s— three generations of us were all at Edsa, massing with a million peaceful people-power warriors to unseat the dictator. It was a new, self-evolving strategy, and many similarly oppressed people of the world learned from it and triumphed.

Worse and scarier

Now we’re back in the same precarious place, and things can only be worse and scarier, not only because the new oppressors are themselves informed by history, but also because we are ourselves hamstrung by a pandemic. God help us if, even so, we resign our fates.

What is different and new is we are all—they and us—up against time and equally vulnerable; the risks are shared by everybody, no one, good or bad, is spared. What sort of self-reinvention, then, in these circumstances can I do?

The answer came providentially in a homily on the second Sunday of Lent by Marty Silva, SJ, a former classmate, at the University of the Philippines, of my daughter’s who now lives in San Diego, California. He is also the son of a dear classmate of mine in high school, at St. Theresa’s.

“In all of creation we are the ultimate project of God. That is why what you are is God’s gift to you—what you can be is your gift to God.”

In whatever station or stage in life, let’s sit quietly in gratitude and reflect on who we are, and promise to work on what we can become. Isn’t that the ultimate transformation, worthy of being a gift to God? My faith in God and man’s innate goodness assures me that any effort on our part will be met more than halfway by a loving God.

It’s the new way, now a dream, I feel, self-developing toward a strategy for reclaiming our peace, our self-respect, our decency, our natural goodness from this regime.

I’m told to let go of old formulas even if they worked well for me