Seven years ago

Old Note

Cleaning up and throwing away unnecessary stuff from my room in preparation for that big move. I found this notebook with mostly empty pages, except for the following 3 entries dated October 21, 2007. That's almost seven years ago.

10-21-2007 SUN. Along the road to Happiness you will find a stone called Pain. It's small, but it seems to block the whole path. Go on, pick it up. Throw it away. Wash your hands, dry your wounds. Don't look back. Keep walking.

10-21-2007 SUN. "True happiness comes only when the center of the universe is not yourself." I don't know who said this, but I'm not the center of the universe and yet true happiness is hard to come by. Or maybe I'm just not getting it. Happiness could be as simple as the absence of sadness. The aftermath of pain.

[The third entry, which is also the last one, is apt right now because summer here in the Philippines is at its peak. And it's been a while that summer has been this hot.]

10-21-2007 SUN. SUMMER BREEZE. "Nothing is more powerful than our childhood memories," William Goldman wrote in the introduction to his novel, "The Princess Bride".

When I was nine, the back of the back of our lot was an empty lot. There was a lone mansanitas tree and a lone sereguelas tree. And two guava trees. The rest of the one hectare lot is filled with different grasses, some short, some tall. It is bordered by coconut trees to the east, a group of bahay-kubo to the south, more coconut trees to the north, and of course to the west is the subdivision where I lived, a plethora of houses differently dressed seated in uniformly-shaped lots. Our house belongs to the group at the east edge of the subdivision, or the village as we called it. I needed take only a few steps and I was transported to a world different from what I knew. It's a world where time stood still (sort of) and silence over-sang the noise. I'd go there, sometimes alone and sometimes with my friends, to be in a place where we were the masters, where it took only our minds to conjure a world worth living for.

The guava tree that looked just like any other guava tree transformed into a fortress as I rested on its branch eight feet from the ground. In that fortress I made time stood still. The summer breeze took its time to blow away my worries.