it was not my birthday yesterday, but i received a gift anyway. it was a box from heaven with a familiar handwriting on one side. i told myself, “that must be the books.” and i was definitely right! courtesy of my cousin, TJ, i now have new additions to my book collection, particularly, Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera, Laura Esquivel’s Like Water for Chocolate, and Alan Lightman’s Einstein’s Dreams, plus another two, which i forgot. it was the first time a big heartfelt smile broke across my face since a mixture of everything bad shattered my faith in life.
typhoons are in no way uncommon in any land, save for those dry countries in which storms are loose grains of sharp sand, though what we are used to are not as rampaging as this last one. a month’s amount of rain in a day’s downpour. hours of wailing and pleading for help. hundreds of bodies buried in the mud, houses broken down, homes shattered. days of bleak darkness and mortal fear. weeks of search and recovery. months of misery and famine. years of mourning and haled recuperation… and a scar in the face of this country to last a lifetime.
if there is one good thing this calamity has brought up, that would be the universal feeling of outpouring concern, which compelled us all to move and lend our hands to people who we know are practically within our reach. but, would we care this much if it happened somewhere else far from our roots? as what my friend, Jaycee, and i were discussing the other night, everything becomes a matter of proximity. people don't really care unless it's happening right in their own backyard. i just hope this disaster would serve its purpose of reminding us, dear dwellers of the earth, to stop complaining about the world deteriorating right before our eyes and start doing something about it. is this exactly what we really dreamed of when we gripped on a frantic swirl of transforming this place into a bricked society, under the mantle of our desires to live conveniently? i don’t see any convenience in this. we might be able to move faster today, only to spend our spare time on things that matter less in our lives. and i’m guilty of drinking all night and slacking off in front of the television or this darn computer!
each of us has a typhoon of his own, be it financial instability, emotional turmoil, or even life crisis. what we often do not realize is that, just like the victims, anyone is a potential sufferer, and unless we initiate changes, tragedies will continue to hound us.
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