Enter 2009

Originally published in Cebu Gold Star Daily, Vol. 1, No. 99, p. 6 (January 16, 2009, Friday)


I begin my duties here at Gold Star by explaining what my column is all about. The French existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre once taught, “We have no choice but to be free”. It might sound like an oxymoron at first look, but it actually makes good sense. Freedom is not a choice but condition that is placed upon us as rational beings. We are not free to choose or reject our freedom. It is this freedom that capacitates us to navigate through the vast ocean of goods, evils and debatable gray areas in life. To the human person, freedom appears to be like a purely desirable gift, but it is also a tremendous responsibility that we need to guard against our own weaknesses. Free choices range from miniscule events like choosing which coffee beans to grab from the grocery store to colossal steps like whether or not to send young soldiers to fight in a foreign land.


In this short life, we spend most of our time trying to acquire wealth and power. In the right hands, these can be genuine instruments of freedom. Wealth can be used to create industries that provide quality goods and services to the people. This, in turn, creates jobs and livelihood for people who would otherwise have nothing. Power can be used to effect proper change and influence the movers in society to follow a desired path. It can be used to fight for a cleaner environment, better living conditions, greater productivity and a great many goods that can be brought about by a single nudge of power.


On the duller side, power and wealth can be used for purely selfish reasons -- reasons that ignore the human condition and rot the soul. This spiritual cancer is one we see too often in today’s world. Relationships become equated with material gifts and quality of life is mistaken for one’s bank statement. I don’t pretend to imply that enjoying the fine things in life is an evil. I enjoy a good cup of gourmet coffee as much as the next guy. But our patterns of behavior and consumption must be a means to better living rather than an end to itself. We ought to strive for quality over quantity – satisfaction over accumulation.


In a place and time where wealth and opportunities are scarce, we always need to come to terms on a daily basis with the choice of either fending for ourselves or to aiding those in dire situations. We are faced with the challenge of overcoming our baser instincts of survival to live in a higher plane of existence as rational and compassionate human beings. This is the cost of our freedom -- responsibility over our own circles of influence, never cowering from these difficult but necessary decisions. We are free and we have no choice but to be free -- no other choice but to face the chain of consequences that our actions bear. We can choose to add to the suffering or to supply reprieve. 


This is our challenge. And it is only right that we grab a chance to review our lives and what we’ve done with our gifts, our wealth and our power. When we use them the way they ought to be used, we create meaning. We transform work into love and power into inspiration. We become people worth imitating – people that others can be proud of.


So this brand new year can be our opportunity to look into the recent past and see how many lives we’ve improved including our own. Did we act as animals or as human being free from our own destructive tendencies? Every day is a chance to be better than who you were yesterday. And that is all we really need to do to be truly free.


Cheers to a wonderful 2009.