[Oe List ...] August 1 OpEd in the Saipan Tribune

[Jaime R Vergara]

Many happy returns
 
We facilitate pedagogy to people becoming conscious of what they already know.  We are not a coercive authority of accumulated learnings for folks to draw from.  A colleague once called me walang hiya (shameless) for using personal testimony in my reflections.  I do use my own experience to ground a point but I do not see self-promotion in them.  We have no self to promote; we witness to elicit reflection on the reader’s own journey, not proffering pearls of wisdom to be treasured.  Transparency is our trade, not transcendent authority or immanent surety.
 
Christian numerology considers 666 a symbol of evil, epitome of life’s illusions.  Freedom exercises volition in reality, not escape to a never-never land.  Popular piety personalizes evil as an external creature.  “The devil made me do it,” is a great comedic line, but human reality is about decisions, including the decision not to decide.
 
We use liuliu 66 in the Sino sense of being able to decide.  Lucidity about my life began when the pillars to my existence started to crumble.  Mama was high on my idolatry until the day busybody Mrs. de la Cruz came calling and dear Mom said, “Tell her, I am not home.”  Mother lied.  The domino effect was swift, from my loyalty to the goodness of my clan, to the covenant on the righteousness of my religion, to the civic commitment on my government’s rhetoric on justice.
 
That crumbling turned me into a fashionable cynic.  When the kick on the gut became personal, self-consciousness was birthed.  “You may write moving love letters but you make a lousy boy friend,” Inday said, and I crumbled.  Reality kept bursting images of my self-esteem; I could not keep up with the band-aid operations to prop up every collapsed selfhood image.  Student, son, lover, husband, citizen, religious, consultant, teacher, etc. – all went the way of shattering.
 
Sometime in 1977, in the arid Deccan plateau of India’s hopelessness, we saw the futility of building any sense of significance.  We could not accumulate enough knowledge to overcome ignorance, fully commit enough to be chaste in fidelity, accomplish anything that would make a meaningful dent in the nature of human existence.  That utter helplessness left us with a choice: continue dressing life with “Oughts”, or, live it “The Way Life Is” (TWLI).  We chose the latter.  No longer anxious to justify our raison d’être, we just lived life “just as I am.” “Just be it,” came out as the result, “without one plea.”  The freedom to be was our birthright.  YES echoed from the cosmic chorus.
 
Ours is not a crisis of ethics; it is a crisis of faith, or, in today’s language, a crisis of confidence.  It was a Travolta/Alley comedy, Look Who’s Talking that gave me the imaginal tool to talk about ‘faith’ in life.
 
In the opening credits, millions of squirmies race to fertilize an egg.  Bouncing that on the particulars of my life, with my parents’ conservative bedroom habits, I was an incredible lottery winner on billion-to-one odds.  Of a crop of 200 million sperms, I was the one that made it; and the egg, given 200 million options, made a choice.  At the moment of my conception, I was already a winner and able to decide.
 
The sperm and the egg together, cooperatively and collaboratively, created in nine months one of the most sophisticated bipedal primates on the planet with an epidermal-digestive-respiratory-muscular-skeletal-neural system that outperforms anything Siemens, Apple and Sony can build.  I was free, a winner, and creative on the day I was born. My genes were bona fide members of the Hallelujah chorale!
 
Except no one bothered to remind me.
 
In fact, human society chose a losing story and escapist lifestyle, in my neighborhood, of original sin at the gate, and heaven at the exit door.  But truth charged in a parable of Yoshua Ibn Nazareth told in my childhood about a 38-year old full of excuses for not being able to live his life the way it was.  “Well, why don’t you just pick-up your bed and walk,” he was challenged.  We muddy up the simple story ignoring the metaphor, but the choice is clear: the sick can continue wailing excuses, or one can pick-up life as it is given, and live.  In the story, the whiner chose to pick-up his bed and walk.  There are other stories, but I made this mine.
 
The above is not a religious story.  It does not require belief on anything.  It is a secular and scientific story, verifiable and sensible in the plane of reality, transparently true about my neighbor as it was to Canaan of old, and myself contemplating grandiose despair at the Ellora caves in Maharasthra.  When judged to the quick, we only have a “Yes” and a “No” choice on life.  “Maybe” is not an option.
 
Accountability is on me again on today's birthday.  “We can live this day, or throw it away.  This is the day that we have,” goes a pre-school ritual.  It is early morning, the first day of the week, the new moon, the new solar cycle – the first day of my life.  Awake, we start a tabula rasa, a shi (beginning that gives us new reasons to celebrate, new journeys to undertake) where we manifest our lucidity and live the wonder of our resolve. 
 
“War, corruption, pestilence, inhumanity, famine, injustice, planetary decline, social decay, communal turmoil, fearful Aryan Norway and veggie vendor in vengeful Koblerville – what do you say to that,” my fellow cynics ask. 
 
“I just live”, I reply.  Transparently so. To be faithful is to be free; to be free is to be faithful.  L’achaim Many Om  happy Amen returns Taojiao, indeed.


j'aime la vie
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