This is one of the first poems I wrote. I have this in one of my old note­books which I almost got rid of already until I found a lot of old poems I had writ­ten many years back.

5: Conclusion">

Thus far, this series of arti­cles have shown the fol­low­ing: that the world we have is a world that can­not wait which on the one hand is nec­es­sary for effi­ciency and orga­ni­za­tion. On the other hand, there are para­doxes we see in this world that can­not wait such as the dis­cov­ery that while you can orga­nize the peo­ple around you, you can­not even make an appoint­ment with your­self; that while the world has become so fast and while dis­tances have been cov­ered, and breadth has been bridged, the world that we have can­not go deep; and that while technology’s goal has been to con­nect every­one in the planet, peo­ple are also build­ing walls to break the con­nec­tion. Now, in order to have a chance at bridg­ing these para­doxes, we need a cer­tain kind of atti­tude. This atti­tude is a philo­soph­i­cal one: to wait for self to catch up with self, to open up to vul­ner­a­bil­ity and com­mit­ment, and to accept ambi­gu­ity and mys­tery. Phi­los­o­phy, which is expe­ri­enced as wait­ing, and while wait­ing, may seem to go against the grain of the world that can­not wait. But if we are to recover our­selves, our rela­tion­ship with the other, our rela­tion­ship with the Absolute—which is also the recov­ery of the para­doxes of our lives—then we need to wait.

The past sev­eral months, we’ve seen the pro­lif­er­a­tion of Hol­ly­wood movies that are pre­quels of movies already shown in the past. We have the really well-made and well-casted Startrek which tells us the back sto­ries of the now leg­endary James Kirk, Dr. Leonard “Bones” McCoy and Spock. We also have the X Men Ori­gins series that begins with Wolverine’s story. They will have a series of X Men Ori­gins movies that will tell us the back sto­ries of Jean Gray, Cyclops, and prob­a­bly even Pro­fes­sor Xavier. A few years back, we had the Bat­man Fran­chise reboot­ing with Bat­man Begins.

4: A World That Cannot Accept Ambiguity">

A world that can­not jour­ney with the self, and can­not go deep, is also a world that can­not accept ambi­gu­ity and mys­tery. The promise of exper­i­men­tal sci­ence has been a black and white world—nature on the dock, inside a test tube. But as we all know by now, that promise has failed. The world is not black and white. And yet peo­ple are going back to this stance of see­ing the world as black and white. This was even more pro­nounced after the 9/11 Bomb­ing and the United States’ War Against Terrorism.

Tomor­row is the Philip­pine Inde­pen­dence Day. In honor of that spe­cial day in our his­tory, I am fea­tur­ing a round up of the Best Arti­cles on the Philip­pines ever pub­lished in AngPere­grino. Read these if you haven’t done yet, and reread if you have. Maybe you’ll feel a lot bet­ter about being a Fil­ipino, or at least grow in your feel­ing of Nationhood.