Why You Need to Go Down to Go Up

' When football stars disappear, so do the teams... if the star is not well, the whole cast suffers.' - Pele 'The problem is that they are all stars in Madrid. You need someone to carry the water to the well.' - Diego Maradona

When The Ball Star Is Not Always You

It is winter solstice in the northern hemisphere. The earth's axial tilt is farthest away from the sun at its maximum of 23° 26'. It is the turning point from which the day starts to be longer than the night. It is however summer solstice in the southern hemisphere, during which the night begins to be longer than the day.

Note not everyone can experience same situation all the time, when someone somewhere goes up, another goes down. When someone is on his foot, somebody else is on his head. When a team got the ball, another is not having it. It is ok to miss the ball or not to be the star and be the water bearer. Athletes, salespeople, and politicians spend their days losing. Anyhow, the most notable winners usually encountered difficult loss before they champed and actually won because they resist discouragement by their defeats. Hey! Play well and want to win. This is not an “allow the ball to kick on you” post.

Humping Habit History

There were two islands I am familiar of more than any other- Panay and Negros. And this is their tale:

Panay is an island of wide flats and small hills and on its flank stripped and strapped by many rivers. These natural irrigations made the place ideal for growing rice. Indeed rice was grown here ever since the first agricultural societies dwell in the island. The masses soon relied to rice. In fact they copied population spread from the fashion of the rice plant. Farmers which rooted from the mouths of the rivers speckled inwards, roads splits left and right, and split further left and right, and split further dividing to unpaved paths which end with isolated dwellings. Each dwelling is a watch over hut to a few rice paddies. The complexity of population distribution which was a gift during the agricultural period became a bad convention to serve with modernization. It rather made social cohesion, technology introduction, economic development and other government projects allocation difficult. It was in charge for the fall of the once progressive Panay.

Negros is island skirt to the Kanlaon volcano. The many years of eruptions fertile the soil enough to attract the elites of Panay to put up sugarcane plantations. The population which established here became dependent to sugarcane and imitated indeed the expansion of a sugarcane plant. The people rooting from a southern delta spread in northward and southward directions constructing compact settlements along the way like node ends in the sugarcane stalk. Each settlement is practically managed by a haciendero, a sugar baron, whose manor, sugar mill, and sugarcane workers, rest at the center of a vast sugarcane field. Each settlement is practically a society in itself. It became easier to build public facilities such as schools and implement economic developing projects in these packaged settlements. This condition made Negros advanced more rapidly than Panay in the modern era.

This tale might resonate as a fiction to you yet the whole lot of what was said here are real situations. Panay is an island in central Philippines intricately meshed into four provinces with a total of 90 towns but only 3 cities. Negros is the island just east of Panay but neatly divided into two provinces with a total of 38 towns and 19 cities. Negros is far advance then with city to town ratio of 1 is to 2. Way ahead of Panay ratio being 1 does to30. Practically, geography and population spread pattern became habitual causes of the continuous downfall of Panay while Negros soars.

I live in Panay and formulated this harsh comparison while having a trip to Negros last weekend: There are some habits we can not change. It sticks to us. It pulls us down. That is what I just discovered. I might regret publishing this in a self motivation blog but I simply have to mention my thoughts. Probably change might ensue breaking those habits. But I don not know how powerful it must be to fix the logarithmic damage brought by history. Probably what we have is acceptance and adaptation to it. Adaptation in a sense that to put this bad habit to good use instead of breaking it. I do not know how exactly. It is brain ruining to think about.

On Black Campaigns

Tomorrow, the 29th of March between 8 to 9 PM in your time zone, you will be in black as the Earth Hour will be observed as part of the non-negotiable anti-global warming campaign. I have experienced 2–month long dark nights two decades ago when the super typhoon Ruping toppled electrical posts in our area while whipping central Philippines. Having an hour without electricity is not much of a bother to me. What dulls me more is the reason behind the campaign, weather it really is for the decaying environment or simply to redirect the public mind from a political activity hostile to the supporting governments just like the first Earth Day set simultaneous with Lenin’s 100th Anniversary. It confuses me as much as I am already confused with the businessmen made-believe “rice shortage” to increase the pricing of this Philippine staple. But anyway if you believe that there is really no significant event to be blocked by this global black out, go participate. Here is the campaign:

An International Dread of Iron Fist

Two years and two decades ago a human barricade in flowers and prayers, marching along the Epifanio de los Santos Avenue in Manila, toppled down a mad man who pathologically ruled the Philippines for 20 years. The strategy was noted to be far effective than any saliva, ink, blood, torches and effigies scrambled in in earlier attempts to break through the trigger-addicted, money-driven, terror-friendly regime. The human barricade succeeded since its soul was not just among those elbow-linking thousands in the capital but extended to the million freedom seekers in every habitable island in the archipelago which seemed to be every Filipino except Ferdinand Marcos, his family, cronies and worshipers. That spirit of solidarity under the wings of freedom from an Iron Fist gave birth to the world's first ever People Power Revolution.

Each member of this global society recognizes some years of living dangerously which often fell between the span of mid 30's to mid 90's which was characterized by Soviet ventriloquisted communist Europe, Che-Guevara-inspired Latin rebellion, post- colonial African republics' wrong concept of democracy, and Asian economic rape and strangulation. Iron fists themselves came in variety internationally such as: open absolute controllers (Agusto Pinochet, Francisco Nguema) or lurking political manipulators (Ne Win, Antonin Novotny, Anastasio Samoza, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, Josip Tito, Vulko Chervenkov); justifying oppressors (Mao Zedong) or benevolent kleptocrats (Juan Peron, Kenneth Kaunda, Anwar Sadat, Omar Torrijos, Fidel Castro); genocide gods (Adolf Hitler, Francisco Franco, Muhammad Soeharto, Pol Pot, Nicolae Ceausesco) or opponent vindicators (Benito Mussolini, Jorge Ubico, Nur Muhammad Taraki, Mengistu Mariamu, Luis Tejada, Zine Ben Ali); and freaked warriors (Gustavo Pinilla, Ho Chi Minh, Moammar al-Qadhafi, Sani Abacha) or dreaming megalomaniacs (Joseph Stalin, Antonio Salazar, Manuel Obria, Idi Amin, Manuel Noriega, Sadam Husein). The unique cultic ideology which spun around the brains of these notorious persona ran down their nerve endings and crossed skins to create a prolonged hair raising sensation in every contingent of their nations. Their eras were marked by changes from maps to marital statuses, from fellowships to food allocation, from culture to concept of truth. Hoodlums come from the government, from people in black robes, from men in uniform, all spreading terror. Every opposition was a rebel, every rebel was executed, every execution was concealed. Companies grabbed from the elite, and soul sipped from the marginalized. The knowledgeables bled, the innocents sweat. Grand projects proposed, started and fell while IMF dept rose. Nearly everyone lost someone or something. Too ghastly to recall, yet too vivid to be forgotten.

To understand it all, Iron Fists were also humans perverted by psychological stresses reaching values critical enough for them to cause such social-politico-economic problem. Such social problem requires only one type of solution – human solution – such as the people power revolution. The success then of depends on the critical mass of individuals (mostly the oppressed) in dread of iron fist who are willing to participate in recollecting the national soul and reviving its people, its government , its economy and its culture and redirecting its destiny.

Practicing Hopeful Resignation

I have foreseen my Obstetric and Gynecologic rotation as blissful assistance to deliveries of singletons, twins and triplets. And it started that way until a train of heartrending cases were admitted: Mothers in early weeks of pregnancy discharging “bloody, meaty material” – early embryonic demise; mothers complaining of no fetal movement beyond 5 months which ultrasonograph proved to be fetal death in utero; and mothers in inevitable feat of delivering a pre-term baby as early as 24 weeks, viability of which in Philippine setting is questionable.

The story of one mother struck me most. She accidentally self-electrocuted at about 4 months of gestation. Tocolytic agents and measures were provided to prevent her from pre-term labor. She was sent home weeks later with advice of regular prenatal check up. The rest of the pregnancy went well until the 7th month when she felt the baby move no more and ultrasound revealed it to be early fetal demise. She was then advice for admission for early termination of pregnancy, which is to prevent the dead fetus from intoxicating her body. She endured the pangs of this circumstance and flips sentiments in the approximates of denial and acceptance. I acquainted her regarding hopeful resignation.

“Hopeful Resignation” was a term I learned last month from a pulmonologist who wished to secure peace in the soul of his end-stage lung cancer patient. It is about surrendering to a resolutionless scientific fact yet welcoming the possibility of event change than can just be heaven sent or arcane. Hopeful resignation is beyond shifting therapeutic tempo from aggressive stunt to watchful waiting. It can also be accepting not to pick up a “survivor’ button and pin to the chest of relatives after a long, sorrowful time of excavating the World Trade rubble, a fire assaulted locality, a plane crash site, or a sunken ship spot. It can likewise serve as a practical management strategy in a sure-fail scholastic reap, an impossible business dip, or a loosening marriage grip.

Hopeful resignation reassembles the pieces of a predictably shattering psych and allows it to face the light of reality intact and with grace. It keeps neural anatomy from dwindling to mental anguish. It saves family energy from wasting in distress. It sets the spirit up flight despite the knowledge of a broken bridge along life itinerary with a scythed troll beneath. Before the eve a detonating finale, cut the depression wire with hopeful resignation.

Where...

There is no Shangri-la, there are just altars on earth.

Where was I?
To confess, I felt horrible. Anyone who has been visiting hulag since it started might already be mystified on my capacity to keep sailing this blog that they thought I embarked with high motivating energy yet currently sinks in a synonymously procrastinating frequency of posting. In fact, I have not been procrastinating in the past days, it is just that I could hardly meet my tops that it won't be difficult for any reader to confuse I have been one. I went to the hospital and made my first duty as a post graduate medical intern, a 1 year training requirement prior to taking the medical board exam. My hospital duty is in a 3-day cycle: 24 hours + 8 hours + 8 hours of work in 72 hours (3 days). And that would be my living cycle be in most of the 366 days (2008 is a leap year). I would most of the time have 32 hours left for bathing, eating, sleeping, commuting, and of course blogging. But I don't want to enclose learning to just hospital practice and so I'll take a quarter of that 32 hours for studying. I have to confess, I can't promise to post as frequent as before. Ngyawww... Down went my vehicle against procrastination. But don't sit back for a landing. We haven't soared up to any point yet. Ride on to my none-wits (if all this graphics might mean that to you). There are personal frailties to be revealed. And speaking of frailties, where was I exactly? I had been hanging around in a place where people kept cheering on other people to live against odds. Smile. I found medicine that way.

Where am I now?
To this specific time point, I'm tapping the keyboard while challenging stress to stimulate myself to write now and pull away from my near programmed life. It is fun meeting feelings like this to marvel about like 3-year old circling lips to a big big OHHH! My mind is busy thinking about rest, securing a nowhere Shangri-la to blow its container through. I wonder on other people also desiring such perfect world that If they can't be in it over this living space, they wish be in it in their post dying space. You probably met words like Nirvana, Heaven, Jannah, Elysian Fields, and Glastheim, Goloka, but has anyone who traveled there returned to earth anyway? Are they just virtual spaces in one’s mind to motivate him to move towards perfection? Or rather we living creatures are just in a virtual space and the ones we desire are the real one? Matrix? The parody of real disillusionment. I critic utopia, the equal world, as a perfect boredom bringer. I believe it is in the unfairness of life where we develop selves, where we display emotions, where we experiment art, where we discover science, where we can consider we are not just space occupying structures in the impartiality of time. But I will break out of that topic realizing just doing it is a utopian perspective. Even breaking from it out of such realization is still utopian... out and over. I think I mentioned utopia too much. And that's not utopian anymore. As of now I am in a world where people create rather than find their own altars and live in it. And make sure to do their best in it to make this word “altar” far from a misnomer.

Where will I be?
To secure uncertainty, don't know where to go from here despite how programmed my life seemed to be. Asking where is not as easy as filling the blank beyond the section ADDRESS:___ which one might answered over and over in hundreds or at least near a hundred of birth certificates, school admission sheets, student ID's, work application forms, calling cards, e-sign ups, electric bills, hospital records, legal affidavits, raffle promos, mortuary insurance loans, and finally death certificates. I believe the laws of motion is will be move to less than a law, the Koch's postulate is left as a postulate, and game theory will remain a marketing game. We sure live in an unpermanent, unsecure, unfair phase of truth (if you consider your world an origami of folding and unfolding truths). But whatever truth is or wherever truth will uncertify us, it is still on our own power to discern unreality and to opt to be real. I don't know life beyond the biological sense that much but I'll try to. That’s why probably I chose medicine as my altar. I will always be into this art of cheering on other people to live against odds. And I'm certain that uncertainty beyond living will not be certified in the future.

When is my next post but when is my next post? I'm still uncertain but I certify you won't feel sorry visiting my blog.

This post is third of a 7-part ellipsis series.