“…I still think of that night as ‘the lifting of the haze,’ and it remains one of the few times I can categorically claim an interaction with God…What happened was that I realized I was not alone in my own surroundings. I’m not talking about ghosts or angels or anything; I’m talking about other people. As silly as it sounds, I realized, late that night, that other people had feelings and fears and that my interactions with them actually meant something, that I could make them happy or sad in the way that I associated with them. Not only could I make them happy or sad, but I was responsible for the way I interacted with them. I suddenly felt responsible. I was supposed to make them happy. I was not supposed to make them sad. Like I said, it sounds simple, but when you really get it for the first time, it hits hard.
I was shell-shocked.”
Donald Miller, “Blue Like Jazz,” p. 9
When I lived in the seemingly working-class subdivision of Doña Luisa, my mom drove a hand-me-down late-80’s Mitsubishi Lancer whose rear-right passenger window consisted of a thick plastic sheet held together at the frame by sticky brown packing tape. It was the kind of thick plastic sheet you covered your books with for the first day of a new schoolyear.
At dismissal, my mom would honk a signature honk (not very original, but distinct: “beeeeep-beeeeep-beep-beep-beep”, if you know what I mean). I’d run out the school gates and we’d drive home down the same road everyday, past Uncle Mark’s where sometimes we’d pick up pan de sal and bola-bola siopao. And the site of what is now SM was once a large field with two malnourished cows, tethered to a post in the midst of it.
At some point in time, down that road was the site of a torn-down building of which remained only a foundation, with cement posts protruding from the base, inch-diameter metal beams snaking their way out into the humidity from the amputated cement posts. Like arteries in wartime gore.
A very different day came, and a very unique event occurred, forever branding the image of one of those posts into my mind. I don’t really recall myself being in much of a pensive mood that day, but somehow at the exact same second we were driving by that abandoned site, and as I looked on at the ruins of the building, I suddenly, for the first time, asked myself that perennial question – “wait, why exactly are we here? What is the purpose of human life in general? Why do we exist at all?” When I got home, I sat on the floor in the middle of our U-shaped media shelf crafted from kawayan, and began of fashioning all sorts of other questions, like “what exactly is the extent of the universe?”, and started trying other fun things, like trying to grasp infinity. As I squatted on the floor, I gazed up at the section of the ceiling that was just two feet above the media shelf, seeing stars and deep space extending just beyond the ceiling, into the void.
It was a very emotionally upheaving day, but a little fun, too. I was about twelve years old. Of course, these are all elementary questions (although the “answers” are not, and should not be!) for the eighteen year-old taking a freshman philosophy 101 class, but for the twelve year-old they can be quite jarring.
In 1999, at age fourteen, I moved to the Bronx, in New York City. So, at around that time, the US had two things that Davao didn’t: affordable dial-up Internet, and sit-down bookstores like Barnes & Noble and Borders whose books, in comparison, were not shrink-wrapped and kept behind the counter. Imagine how thrilled I was when I found out that this act of thinking real hard about things like the universe and God and the meaning of all things was called (gasp!) Philosophy. Like, people actually did this stuff, and people actually wrote about this stuff, and people actually had (or pretended to have) answers to this stuff! Answers to my questions!
Being the morose fan-of-educated-punk-bands-like-Bad-Religion teenager that I was, one of the stereotypical places to start in philosophy for an angsty youngin’ is Existentialism. The themes ring true for a lonely adolescent – we are completely alone, we are completely responsible for our own actions in this world, and we are condemned to be free. Existence is a big nauseating thing, and life in general is fundamentally absurd. Furthermore, existence is a burden forced upon us, something we did not ask for. Before coming into existence, “why were we not consulted?”, goes the saying/question.
Fun!
In reality, I was really damn lonely. That one year spent in the Moshulu Parkway neighborhood of the North Bronx was probably one of the loneliest times in my life, when I thought It’d be exciting to have my own room. My room was actually 1/3 of the large living room in an apartment, and we threw in some makeshift furniture and a basic twin bed. I get sad when I think of my younger self sitting alone in that room in the cold, trying to learn to rap because that was the thing to do around there, looking up every possible Wu-Tang offshoot posse to the nth degree of consanguinuity. Until I eventually sort of gave up and returned to my roots in alternative rock and all that good 90’s stuff. You can’t help being lonely when you’re 13 and you start over in a totally foreign environment where winter actually happens, and the weather falls below 70 degrees, and the sun disappears at 5 pm. I started thinking I had SAD – and maybe we all do, to some extent. One of the loneliest times I remember consisted of me sitting on my bed, listening to the somber guitaristic musings of Al Di Meola, John McLaughlin, and Paco Delucia as “The Guitar Trio”, as the cold was pounding on my window. Their minor-scaled licks only threw me deeper into teenage pensiveness. I testify to piercing pains in my chest during that time.
The lonelier I got, the more I started to wonder about solipsism. It’s probably the pinnacle of loneliness – and not to mention self-absorption - when you start going in that direction, thinking maybe that those people who have loved you all your life actually may not exist, but are simply a figment of your imagination, and that somehow you are alone in the universe – wait, what universe? Maybe it’s all one big prank!
One night just like any other night, along came a moment that was unexpected. I mean, I think I was rotating myself from a supine position in order to sit up on my bed, maybe from a nap, or maybe from just plain lying down for a bit. And perhaps I was thinking my thoughts that were part solipsistic and existentialistic once again. Really, though, in retrospect, perhaps all they were were just angsty and depressive. In other words, distinctly teenage in some way (but I don’t discount the childhood experiences that contribute to such an outlook being manifested in the teenage years; that discussion is for a whole other post).
Upon sitting upright, the first thing (naturally) that I was looking at was the floor – the parquet floor that extended from the living room into my “bedroom”. Then, I felt a sharp popping sensation originating from the back of my head, and a flash of intuitive clarity seemed to burst in the center of my mind, and suddenly, many things about my current state were clarified without a single concrete though having to be formulated.
I realized that the floor existed. Not only that I sense the light being deflected by the matter which makes up the parquet floor onto my eyes, but that it, as an object in itself, exists. I felt that it exists, that it was lifeless, there, independent of me and my thoughts. It existed! It was brimming with something causing it to be infinitely qualitatively different from nonexistence, and yes, that difference is infinite when you really think about it quantitatively! And it’s another thing to feel the difference of existence, vis a vis nothingness.
Furthermore, and infinitely more importantly, I realized that my Dad existed. In himself, with a history and feelings of his own. Forty-odd years of experiences that have shaped who he is, what makes him happy, and what makes him sad. A personal and relational universe in his very own right, seeking to love and be loved in an outpouring and sharing of selfhood, manhood, and fatherhood. With thoughts that he thinks, in which he is also consumed. Constantly. Worries, those that a provider has. And that he loves me very much, and that I should love him, love him as much as I could. And that I could start by being less snarky.
My Dad existed. He was human. He was my Dad, an indelible part of my identity as a young man. I could go on to talk about my other relatives as well, but I think a large part of what was going on my mind was how to reconcile certain matters about living with my Dad, which is why I think primarily of him from this experience. I had not lived with him consistently for seven straight years before that.
Somehow life and the universe (and above all, God) had conspired to give my grey matter a playful poke (and a playful poke from God is a de-toothing punch in the face), and know that people are there who breathe, feel, hurt, and desire joy and comfort just as much as I did, and that in some way, I should try to do things to increase their joy and comfort. And, while it was quite childish that I actually considered this, I in fact was not alone in the universe, and people were not a figment of my imagination. I felt that it was true; it’s one thing to know a truth, it’s another to experience and feel a truth. It’s glorious! Along the lines of what Don Miller wrote in Blue Like Jazz, I “was supposed to make [my Dad] happy. I was not supposed to make [him] sad”.
Granted, it would take me years to start being truly less snarky – heck, to even start wanting to be less snarky. As much as I hated it at the end of the day, adolescence seems to have compelled it too much for good reason. And, well, in addition, it would take years to finally start unearthing some of the things that might’ve contributed to such a morose state at the time. But, I simply cannot undercut the most important thing I learned that night, at least on the conceptual level of principles and truisms: one should love, and love genuinely, selflessly, and with purest of intent and concern. It’s one thing to know; learning to do it is a lifelong process, and I’m happy to stay it’s still going on.
