life

Textbooks of our Lives

One of my brothers had a way of simplifying matters whenever I present him with a complicated situation. He’d tell me to act one way or another, in accordance to what his veteran wisdom would consider to be logical or intuitive. “Basang-basa na yang kwento na yan (that story has been read many times before),” he’d say, pointing out that most situations we encounter in life have already happened to a lot of people. The history of people’s lives are so rich that most of our problems have a textbook solution.

There’s a big difference, however, between knowing what to do and the actual performance. The plan laid down in front of us, and the audacity to start the action. It is this gap that renders all of us living the way we do. We carry on by solving one problem at a time, some being a little bit more difficult than others.

To make things more challenging, surprises may hit us every once in a while. Like mean twists at the end of a long movie. Something from far left field perhaps, or an experience so unique that we could bet all-in that not a single letter was written about it in anyone’s life scroll. How do we deal with these then?

We are adaptive. We are resilient. Because of this, we do get through the snags eventually. Our survival, of course, remains to be seen. One thing’s for sure though: once it’s over, the story is considered written.

Perhaps someone else would come across this new story. If it helps just one other person, it would have been a story well played.