Two years ago, twenty Dutch friends and family flew to Cebu, Philippines for our wedding ceremony. I was very excited to show them my city. We had a full program laid out that included the best beach and island resorts, parties in upscale venues and the best sights and sounds Cebu has to offer.
So I was a bit miffed after the welcome dinner we organised for them in a top resort when I asked them if they were having a good time and most reactions were along these lines:
“Yes, we are having a great time. But it feels a bit strange to be in such a beautiful place and in a lavish party with all these food when there is so much poverty a few meters away once you drive out of these gates.”
Towards the end of that night my brother-in-law, having imbibed a little bit too much alcohol as well, approached me with a wad of bills outstretched in his hands and with tears in his eyes he pleaded, “There are so much poor people here, please give this to them, please.” That night has become part of the wedding memory stuck in my head all these years.
Anyone who has travelled to a third world country is quite familiar with the following scenes and there are no shortages of footage on international news cables as well. Children knocking on car windows begging for money and food, chaos in public transport systems, messy networks of electric wires and power cables spanning the skyline, the list goes on. And if you’ve lived and grown up in these places as I’ve had, you become desensitized to it. You can even lead a lifestyle out of touch from this kind of reality that surrounds you everyday, something far removed from the eighty percent who live in poverty. All within a few kilometers from each other.
In the last two weeks since I got back here in Cebu, and as I drive out everyday from the gated subdivision where I reside, I pass by this young couple with a one-year old boy living under the flyover less than two kilometers away. They survive by begging on the streets and sleeping on cardboard boxes at night without blankets. This is nothing new to me. I grew up to these sights so why is it bothering me now?
I see the mess of black cables lending a third-world vista to our skyline and I think of the families who own the electric power supply, cable and phone companies. They live in palatial mansions with a coterie of house helpers and send their children to the most expensive private schools and it makes me wonder, what do they think about when they drive through the streets and see the ugliness they’ve created?
Politicians’ names are shamelessly emblazoned on skywalks, flyovers and bridges as constant reminders to its citizens lest they forget who initiated those projects. As if it was their very own funds used to erect it. These lawbreakers makers own city and beach houses and sprawling farming lands in the countryside. They spend their holidays abroad and send their children to universities in London and America. Do we need to ask who is paying for all of those? What if they get decent and honest paying jobs, even as top-level managers of corporations, would they still be able to lead the same lifestyles? And why won’t they get their act together to improve the plight of the country’s poor?
How do they feel driving around in their gas-guzzling, air-conditioned SUV’s when they have clearly failed the people they campaigned so hard to serve and the country they’ve profited so much from with their businesses?
I always thought that over time, as when you’ve seen more of the world and have travelled enough to understand the co-existence of wealth and poverty and the reasons why some countries have wider gaps in living standards among its people compared to others, you become less critical and judgmental and you attempt to rationalize and understand things at an intellectual level.
I come from this third world place and it’s hard to be rational about it. I’ve never been a patriot but Cebu has a special place in my heart. I believe in taking care of the square meter we revolve around in. I believe in leaving this world and the places we live in a better condition than when we arrived. This country is one of the most beautiful on earth and the Filipinos are some of the kindest people on this planet. There is so much potential to make it a liveable place for everyone, not only as the wealthy people’s playground.
On the plane ride from Singapore to Cebu, I overheard two Americans talking to each other.
One asked, “Do you like it here?”
The other replied, “It’s one of the poorest and dirtiest countries I’ve been to. But the people are good.”
Why is it always the foreigners who see these things?
I look back to that night when our culture-shocked Dutch guests were in tears, quietly brooding the changing landscapes of manicured gardens and swimming pools that glisten at night vis-à-vis the poverty of the masses. I don’t feel insulted anymore as I did back then.
I finally understand why the Dutch people cried.
I read somewhere sometime ago an advice that we should examine our lives in chunks of five years. That we should answer questions like: What have you accomplished in the last five years? Are you any closer to living your dreams or have those dreams become reality? Are you still pining away for the lost love or have you opened your heart to new experiences? What good have you done? Have you spread joy and made others’ lives happier?
So it is that time of year that I sit and reflect on all of the above, and then some more.
Seven years ago, under a canopy of thick foliage in the jungles of Taman Negara in Malaysia, this wonderful Dutch guy who I just met for three months and barely knew asked, “Come with me and we’ll have the greatest adventure of our lives.”
It took me awhile to decide, but five years ago I took the plunge and moved here in The Netherlands.
And what a ride it has been. Two weddings in two countries later, two wonderful little daughters in between, a house we bought and turned into a home, a couple of changes in careers, a start-up, the struggles in a marriage and making up after. And just when everything settled down and finally became familiar and comfortable we’re now changing directions once again. My husband’s expatriation takes us a hundred eighty degrees turn back to Kuala Lumpur where it all began. The adventure goes on.
Some friends and associates are surprised I haven’t officially announced the move. Because I’m having trouble letting go. Because I don’t want to be written off while I’m still here. Because I want to soak up every experience I’ll ever have from this moment onwards and everyday until I take that plane ride. Because I feel at home here and I have friendships and a strong network that I truly treasure. I love living in The Hague and after all, I still have my business here. So while some call it expatriation, I call it an extended holiday. A wishful thought of shuttling between The Hague and Kuala Lumpur.
As I grapple with these changes and try to accept the realities of being a trailing spouse, while I go through the motions of sorting out our stuff, worrying about my children growing up far away from their grandparents whom they adore, vacillating on decisions between renting or selling the house, entrusting the business to someone else in my absence and living in two worlds at the same time – while everyday life goes on and sentences run long without punctuations for such is the state of my mind these days, I scour my memory and search for answers from everything I’ve accumulated all these years.
A friend whose family successfully runs a real estate business once told me, “Never fall in love with your land or your business, no matter how great it is. When the opportunity presents itself, you let go and you sell. Prime properties get developed all the time.”
A stark contrast from how we hold on to places and things, homes and businesses, like children that we’ve painstakingly nurtured and cultivated. How do we let go? And yet, the answer stares right at our faces. Such is the wisdom of the ancient universe as immutable as the laws of life. We give birth and when the time comes, we let go and let our children take flight.
We let go of what we are now to give way to what we can become. To see the world, to understand it better and find love in the eyes of strangers who will eventually become our friends. To close the gap between cultures, to understand and celebrate our differences and to learn how to respect what we don’t necessarily like. To do good. There are a lot of things to be grateful for.
This is not my first departure and I’ve spent half my life running away from people and places before it got too close so I think I should have mastered this art already. I am a changed person now. I am not anxious. I am not even stressed out. I feel assured, I am joyful, I am happy. I am not under any illusion that it’s going to be a smooth ride, but I feel deep in my gut this is going to be a beautiful one.
And still it doesn’t make it any less painful…how do you say goodbye?
You meet a person for the first time. Everyone’s raving about him and how he’s built a successful empire with a business model he designed. And yet, for some reason, you feel uneasy about the whole thing. There is something about that business model that is not in sync with your own inner compass, your integrity. Everybody’s doing business with him, so would you do too?
We have been conditioned to weigh the pros and cons of a situation before jumping into it. To think and use our brain to process information and make sense of it. Often, we come up with decisions based on pure rationalization and logic dictates we follow that, even when we feel quite the opposite. Events confront us everyday that make us doubt if we’ve acted on the right decisions.
My previous job as a business teacher in an international school in The Hague included mentoring a group of students. It was at times heartbreaking to see some of them so tortured at their business studies. Asked if they were really interested to pursue their marketing courses, they say yes but everything about their body language gave them away. It was as if they were trying to convince themselves more than me. So why did they go ahead and choose a business course? Because it was what their parents wanted for them.
So they drag themselves everyday to school, lacking in motivation and their marks showed it; out of sync with their truths. Because some of them would rather study fashion design or photography. Oh, if only they could follow their hearts even if it meant risking their parents’ disappointments. What follows is a string of depressions and unexplained illnesses, feigned or real.
A regular check-up with the optometrist turns into one of those introspective moments that make you examine closely the consequences of your actions. Of seeing how you push yourself, your body into overdrive until you collapse from exhaustion. It makes you realize that maybe you should have paid attention to that constant irritation with the lenses in your eyes. Then maybe it wouldn’t have turned into an inflammation in your inner eyelid had you given it the needed attention right away.
We’ve read enough articles telling us to quiet our brains because that non-stop chatter tunes us out to the other parts we should have been keenly listening to instead. Sadly, we don’t pay enough attention to what our bodies tell us. When we feel pain, what do we do? We push it aside and ignore it until one day the pain becomes unbearable and that’s the only time we run to the doctor. We prioritize work and meetings to fill up our days, social events at nights and online surfing in between.
Oriah Mountain Dreamer, author of The Invitation, wrote:
“I want to know if you can disappoint another to be true to yourself.”
Society has enough demands on you that you should stop feeling guilty if you don’t attend that networking event or volunteer for another charitable cause because your loyalty should be to yourself first.
Learn to heed your body and tune in to what it’s telling you. All the languages it speaks: the sinking feeling at the pit of the stomach, the pounding heart when you’re in a dark alley, the physical gnawing pain at the lower rib cage, the ringing in your ears, or the discomfort running through your veins when you’re in the company of someone or in a setting you are not particularly interested in. Most importantly, yield in to it and take action when it speaks.
TR Duncan, a dear friend and a lovely being inside and out, who has taught me much about compassionate, non-violent communication, succinctly puts it:
“Getting into our bodies and having the capacity to articulate what our needs are is a life gift at any age.”
CC Photo Courtesy DavidRphoto ❘ Flickr
The notion of an ideal marriage has been drummed up to us at an early age. All storybook romances lead up to the ultimate victory, when he gets down on his knees and proposes. And fairy tales always end with ‘and they live happily ever after’. This is where it all goes wrong because this statement could anything be but farthest from its truth.
Marriage is not a one-time triumph of woman getting man to propose. Consciously choosing to commit to someone and build a life together is a lifelong obstacle course – and not all survive. Asking two people to share everything together: their lives, decisions, choices, needs and wants is one of the most daunting challenges to expect from two human beings. And yes, it can be extremely fulfilling too — when it works.
Giving up what you want in order to compromise, or arrive at decisions on which both parties are truly satisfied is difficult. Just reaching a middle ground is victory enough at certain times. Add children to the equation plus the western concept of individuality and everything becomes overwhelming.
Women in general tend to lose more because we are the more giving gender. We are so used to giving up a lot of our own needs, and ourselves and so it becomes natural for us to take the back seat in pursuing our careers once we have children. We forget ourselves often.
We are born with the mother instinct, the nurturing nature, and we easily make room and space for everyone else in our lives. Pack up our bags and move to wherever our boyfriends live or where our husbands’ next job assignment takes us. Because “someone has to take care of the children and hold the fort while he goes out hunting.”
Women and the myth of work-life balance
CC Image Courtesy x-ray delta one on Flickr
But times have changed and we’ve realized since then that we are intelligent human beings equally capable of hunting and nurturing at the same time. So we invented the work life balance concept believing that we can have it all. We tried, and we find out it isn’t quite working out well as we expected. We thought we could juggle careers and take care of the household and have children in between. And we’re all ending up stressed out, distraught and feeling like we’re all failures. How do we find our inner peace from all these opposing schools of thought and external chaos?
In her book A Year by the Sea:Thoughts of an Unfinished Woman, author Jane Anderson and her husband decide to take a “vacation” from their marriage when she refused to follow him to his new job in another state and instead cocooned herself in a beach house in Cape Cod. Her two sons were all grown up and married by then. What follows next is a woman’s journey of self-discovery and communion with nature, and thereby regaining her own self. Classic.
Her story serves as a helpful reminder to every woman in midlife or any age actually, to take the time to nurture our own person, the woman inside of us, while we try to fulfill all the other areas of our lives.
I don’t want to wait until my children are all grown up and look back at all these years behind me feeling like a lifetime passed me by. I don’t want to wake up and realize one day that I’ve given too much of myself and forgotten me because I know the things I do now at thirty plus years will feel differently if I do them at fifty. I want to believe that I can have connubial bliss and raise my children and pursue my highest truth in this moment, as I live them.
What we really need after all is to be able to experiment with different models of how to make our relationships and our lives work. It may entail long stretches of time away from the conjugal state without feeling threatened if this means rejuvenating ourselves from the demands of family life. It might mean scaling down a bit on the career front. Or happily giving up our jobs for domestic bliss. Whatever works.
And we can certainly do with a lot of understanding, help and kindness from the people around us, and a lot less judgment and criticisms.
“What do you wish for?” I asked a dear friend.
“I want to live in the present, to be here now,” she replied.
“My problem is I live too much in the now!” I blurted out.
“But that’s good. How do you do that? Tell me. Tell me. You always look so radiant, so calm,” she pressed on.
How did I arrive here? It wasn’t so long ago that I was a member of the “I’ll-be-happy-when” tribe.
But this has been a year when death came harvesting people I know. Some I have shared many stories, dances and laughter with. Others I’ve worked closely together with in my previous employments and still others I have met socially on certain occasions. These were people about or around my age. In the universe’s natural order of things they would have been young parents or peaking at their careers.
Death came suddenly, robbing them of their lives. Aneurysm, meningitis, pancreatitis, a car accident and a shooting incident… they were all stealth and swift. I have had these deafening silences where the whole universe stands still after receiving the news one by one, over and over, in a matter of months from each other. The latest was a week ago. Somewhere out there are people grieving for and missing a son, a father, a brother, and a friend.
Death came and took my grandmother this year as well. Living abroad, I hadn’t seen her in two years except on skype. This is a passing away that’s easier to accept. She was ninety when she died, having truly lived her life and her years. And while the reality of knowing that I’ll never talk to her again in this physical world sets in, I have never felt her presence nearer to me than now.
But in those moments when I was gripped by anguish, fear and paranoia, my insecurities and indecision rose to the surface. Unhappiness and dissatisfaction engulfed me. I turned to my husband, a man I continue to learn so much from. He is never flustered, a perennial sunshine all throughout the gloomy days. There is a reason that the universe brought us together. At times I resent him for his calm demeanour to the point of accusing him that he is too relaxed that’s probably why I’m the one designated to stress out.
