By Atty. Antonio P. Pekas
I was reading somebody’s post middle of last night about worries on getting old and I could not help but mutter, “we cannot help it, can we?”
The mind can be so creative about what and how things can happen to us. And blindingly fast at that. It can go fast forward five years or ten years from now, even up to infinity. More so if you were hard up in breathing, every gasp could be your last.
I remember when I was rushed to the hospital about three years ago. What worried me most was my circumstances, economically that is. I had nothing which made me cling more to God or to the one I thought I could access. For I had nothing. No health insurance, no nest egg to rely on, and no pension.
Then it struck my mind, so many people had all sorts of safety nets to assure comfort in old age but the next minute, they just dropped dead in the bathroom, utter failures even in making sure their dependents would be fine. So, I concluded, anything can happen whatever preparation you made.
Then that part of the Sermon on the Mount surfaced in my brain. ‘The birds don’t store hay in the barn and yet they go on living…’
So somehow, at the back of my mind, I thought, things would be fine. Then relatives, friends, and classmates, without being solicited came to financially help. While one can be flattened by all sorts of costs in the hospital, somehow we did not become so helpless.
Same thing happened about three weeks ago. A brod in UPLB took it upon himself to start a fund drive for me as I earlier wrote. I did not even have to ask for that to happen and yet it happened. So here I am still alive and will go on living. It is validation that GOD knows what we need. Of course we have to work for things in life. Well, I had been working like hell all my life.
I recall the Ananda Marga monk I went with on tour around the country with in 1976 after quitting school. I remember asking him, a foreigner, how we would be able to go back to Manila. He said, God will come in the form of a friend, a stranger or just about anybody. We will be OK as long as we are sincere in our quest of realizing the truth.
While we are nothing compared to Kris Kristofferson, he provided the lesson on how to realize the truth about what we really want in life for real happiness. He was already a military captain, a pilot, a Rhodes graduate scholar with an offer for him to be a professor at West point. But he threw it all away to go to Nashville to be a janitor and to wait on tables to survive while honing his song writing ability. After all the struggles, a number of his songs hit number one in the bill boards and the rest is history. Yes, the rest is history….. on being sincere in finding the truth of what will really make one happy.**
