Bluer than Blue — Regine Velasquez Cover

This is one clas­sic break up song. I heard it on the taxi on the way home from work and wanted to write about it. I just love this ver­sion by Regine Velasquez. Regine has gone through bad break-ups and “bad” rela­tion­ships where she was seen as the other woman who broke up cou­ples. She’s in a rela­tion­ship with singer/songwriter Ogie Alcasid right now, which started out weird but is end­ing happily.

When you’re bluer than blue and sad­der than sad, maybe you just need to wait and let things turn a page, and see that things do turn out well in the end.

Fr. Jojo Mag­a­dia, in a homily sev­eral years ago, called it A LONGER VIEW OF THINGS. When things are bad and not turn­ing out as well as we had hoped, we need to take a longer view–a view that goes beyond the here and now into tomor­row and the future where things will turn out bet­ter, or at least when hurts are less hurt­ing as before.

This LONGER VIEW allows us two things: 1) HOPE and 2) PERSPECTIVE.

HOPE is know­ing that things will make sense in the end. Some­times things turn out bet­ter, but at other times, it doesn’t. Hope, on the one hand, is see­ing bonum futu­rum arduum posi­bile– a good future that is dif­fi­cult but possible.

But hope is not just about things turn­ing out bet­ter, it is about events/loss/suffering mak­ing sense. Jesuit Fr. Fer­riols, one of my phi­los­o­phy teach­ers, talked about the Fil­ipino word for mean­ing: KAHULUGAN, and pointed out that it comes from the word hulog, which means “to fall”. Mean­ing then, is about things falling into place. Find­ing hope is like that. Hope is about things falling into place. When things fall into place, there is mean­ing. There is peace.

The twin of HOPE is PERSPECTIVE. It is a choice of con­text or ref­er­ence from which to see things. There are two things impor­tant here. One is that per­spec­tive is a choice. See­ing the glass half-full or half-empty is really up to us. The sec­ond impor­tant thing is that per­spec­tive always needs a con­text and a van­tage point. And for us, the van­tage point is always look­ing back at what has already hap­pened. Only God has the capac­ity to see our “past”, present and “future” all at the same time. And because our van­tage point is one of “look­ing back”, then there is a need to wait. For things to take its course. For another chap­ter in life to come. For life to turn another page.

Per­spec­tive is see­ing things with new eyes–eyes filled with hope, eyes filled with the sense that things will turn out bet­ter or at least that things will fall into place and make sense. Some events in the past may have hurt us so much, but we real­ize that we have the capac­ity to sur­vive what­ever life gives. And some of us do not just sur­vive but thrive.

And while life may seem BLUER THAN BLUE right now, we do hope that things will be bet­ter FOREVERMORE. :p

1. Wait­ing
2. Real Great­ness
3. Of Fathers and Kites and Whistling for Hope
4. Catch Me I’m Falling