Sunday, March 26, 2006
Estremera: Secret fears
By Stella A. Estremera
Spider's Web
A FRIEND travels by land, on ship, and by plane to Manila, depending on how urgent or laidback his travel plans are. His theory: you would lessen the chances of...
No. 1: Ending up all scrunched up because of your long and tiring land trip to the national capital;
No. 2: Being among the bloated bodies from one other ship tragedy, and;
No. 3: Being among the charred bodies of a plane crash.
He insists by distributing his mode of travel among the three, and then he's beating statistical likelihood of getting killed while on his vehicle, a ship or a plane.
My brain cells quietly mumble: Last time I looked somebody crashed his car on an electrical post and he was not even on his way to Manila.
Another friend gets overly sentimental when seeing television commercials that show young girls growing up to be women. He has a daughter and he has long feared growing old.
It's sad, he said. The saddest song ever, he added, is Florante's "Handog". Especially that part that goes: "Tatanda at lilipas rin ako, nguni't mayrong awiting iiwanan sa inyong alaala..."
Brain cells smirk and giggle at these fears before realizing that it also has. The fear of crossing the thin line between sanity and insanity.
Thus, for so long there has been this deliberate "training of the mind" to never gather so much material things and never let material things occupy ones mind so much.
The reason? The fear of ending up as one more "taong grasa" who mumbles or shouts in the streets while lugging around sacks of we will never know what that just keep on growing bigger everyday.
At least, snooty brain cells say, the body will be the first-ever taong grasa who's not burdened by any of those material things that is anyway already immaterial to the existence of the taong grasa, except as maybe some forgotten urge to gather, to collect, to own.
Picture us, three friends: One an adventurer who goes to a lot of lengths and depths, and travels long distances, and yet fears traveling. Another, a very loquacious, jolly man who bursts into tears when seeing a television commercial, and an editor whose greatest fear is a "taong grasa" or the likelihood of her becoming one.
From where these fears come from? How they came about and when? We can never tell. They're just there, a part of our life, a part of our being. And it's that which grounds us to the reality, that we are mortals after all: we face death, we face old age and that period in time when we are no longer remembered, we face insanity.
It's up to us how we face these and how we prepare for it.
An acquaintance (brain cells will never accept her as a friend. No way, they say) jolted me from my quiet inspection of the Korean grass at my feet as she shrieked and moaned. Laugh lines and crow's feet are appearing on her face, she whimpers while scrutinizing her face from her compact mirror.
Big deal, my brain cells mumbled as I smiled and gave my best sympathetic look suddenly realizing that the Korean grass looked more interesting than the moaning acquaintance can ever be. I'll spare you the details, I'm more worried about the state of my brain...
saestremera@yahoo.com
(March 26, 2006 issue)
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