By Jan Vicente B. Pekas
Being a young kid thrust into the world, it is an experience of never-ending amazement seeing all the wonderful things this earth can offer. Seeing your first backflip in person, watching the drivers as they shift gears with their feet, and seeing a pretty girl for the first time. Life always has something new to show every single day. It always has so much to offer for all of us.
Music, for example can be a never-ending source of joy and a mixture of feelings. So many genres had been created, and as we go through life and gain more experiences, music always has something in store to accompany us. New sounds and melodies keep on springing up.
As a child, one of the many experiences of awe and amazement was the ability of our jeepney drivers to multitask. To this day, my eyes can still be glued as their hand reaches out to the back while the other maintains the steering wheel. And with 20 plus passengers on board, their ability has always stuck with me through the years.
Of course the issue of jeepney modernization is still ongoing and people seemingly have different opinions on the matter. Before the debate on that became hot, the rampage of Covid was the main subject of the media. During those days all of us were affected, especially our jeepney drivers. Then came the continuous hike of gas prices still showing no signs of abating or of going back to their levels before.
Now, as the children are back to classrooms and jeepneys are back to being packed full with passengers, some flashes of life before have come back. But, some issues that continue to plague our society remain and they continue to stack up. And the new normal as they call it seems to have taken its place in our reality.
Our normal before was not one of a perfect life. It was one with issues and problems that have yet to be resolved. And the pandemic that came only added to our already massive issues as a country.
While life has started to show some signs of the previous one before the pandemic, let us all strive for a better normal this time around. The pandemic forced us all to shut our doors, but it never killed the fire inside us all to fight for a better life.
The children are back to their classrooms but mental health continues to be overlooked. It was the same even before the pandemic. It did not suddenly come out of nowhere, it was always there. Not only in the children but in all of us.
Being trapped indoors forced us all to look in the mirror and acknowledge our own shortcomings. We are all capable of making mistakes and fixing them, most of all we have the ability to learn and do something for a better life. And I doubt a pandemic can douse that God given ability.
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