By Atty. Antonio P. Pekas
Friday afternoon found me with debilitating press day blues. As if my writer’s juice will never flow at all.
It was early afternoon. Just came from court and then had lunch with clients. Recovering from the inertia of having had to out battling the elements, I wondered what simulant to take to get me going.
While I stopped drinking coffee due to my elevated blood pressure caused by the covid vaccines, I concluded I had to take at least a cup of the brewed kind with nothing added if this issue were to see the light of day. As they say, the bad things about coffee are the things you add to it.
It so happened that my client coffee shop downstairs was closed. Perhaps he just had to run a quick errand. So I walked over to wards Easter College, thermos-cup in hand, to a place serving good coffee at a very reasonable rate. On the way, I saw a poster by the gate of a house cum coffee shop; It says, “Coffee and love are good when they are hot.” You bet!
Moving on, I saw another good one by the back portion of the new small commercial building across the road from the Easter Weaving Room. Apparently there is a food service under it at the back side. The letters were stark red on a white background: “Siruk Food Service.” I muttered, “Not bad!” I did not have time though to check it out.
After I got my coffee, I went back to the office to sip it from my thermos-cup. Waiting for the caffeine to kick in I started looking at the news that came in from the net. Nothing interesting to write on. Not even from the national dailies.
Then it came. “Creativity.”
The “Love and coffee are good when they are hot” and “Siruk Food Service” are creative enough.
During the pandemic lockdowns, every droplet of creativity juice must have been squeezed from everybody’s brains in order to find the formula on how to survive. Perhaps only those in government missed that opportunity to exercise their brain cells to expand and become better— especially when it came to survival. In that respect, their continuing salaries during those difficult times was a disadvantage. They were actually the losers.
The winners are the operators of small businesses who had to find ways to remain afloat. And they found the ways. Am sure they are now more confident they can get through any kind of difficulty that will come their way in the future. That is what crises give us. The opportunity to become better.
Another biggest winner are those whose sources of income or businesses were wiped out. Mostly small business operators, they had to break their brains to come up with something in order to survive. They gave rise to home food delivery services. They cooked food in their homes then advertised these through various social media platforms.
That is another thing. Even technology idiots were forced to learn how to take advantage of the social media or the internet.
Others resorted to online selling. No overhead costs to think of. They just had to come up with creative ways to move their stocks in trade. Yes, you would be amazed of the solutions the human brain can come up with.
Still others sold wagwag or ukay-ukay goods on retail. Somebody I know would put her goods in a bag and carried this to show to customers door to door. From office to office or from house to house.
Hopefully, such small businesses can be spun off to become bigger ventures in the new normal.
In sum, rolling one’s sleeves even higher is not enough. We have to do it along with rolling up our creativity index or exerting more mental energy for creative solutions in order to survive.
I should be telling these to myself.
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