By Atty. Antonio P. Pekas
A week or two ago as part of the medical order for me to take things easy, I was able to rest well for about two days. On the third day, I felt very good. As if I could take on the world, I felt that my Bell’s Palsy was totally gone. Then the next day, I was flat on my back. I just felt sick. It was opposite what I was feeling the day before. The thinking was to retreat from the world.
About a week before that I was feeling so lousy so I decided to go and have a massage. Boy, was it good for my stiff muscles and joints due to stress. At the end of the process, the masseur pulled my toes to crack out the tension or stress accumulated in the joints there. It was going well until he overdid it on one of the toes. He pulled it so hard it suffered a sprain. It was so painful and until now, it has not yet fully recovered.
Before that, as I related several times, I got the Bell’s Palsy. My speech is still garbled but the situation is slowly improving. But of course I am not young anymore. So I had been whiling my time away, not doing any serious work as I could not concentrate. For days, I would line up the chairs in my corner of the office and sleep after telling my staff, “Do not disturb! Not for any reason.”
The past weeks was one of those times when everything about me seemed not to be working well. Then I heard on TV what I needed. It was a part of a song one contestant on American Idol sang. It was just two phrases I understood but enough for me to get an Epiphany about the “everything about me is not working well.” Here goes:
This is my fight song
Get back my life song
Yes, be in a fighting mood, take back my life. Take on the world if necessary. But my body has to recover, as it is slowly recovering.
But what life should I be taking back?
Then I realized what was wrong with me. I was burned out. For more than two decades I had been deceiving myself about having two stressful jobs— lawyering and publishing and editing this paper. Every latter part of the week I had to take care of making sure this paper would come out on Sunday. The stress would be intense especially with the ever escalating prices of everything. Once the paper is out, I am OK but it takes a few days for me to recover. I would recover Wednesday afternoon and I would have Thursdays to do some legal work. Fridays, the press work again starts. Saturdays, the printing. So actually there is no time for recovery as on working days there are court trials to attend to, appointments to beat, etc.
I managed to just get by the past two decades but now it is different. The “everything is not working well about me” is God’s way of telling me, “Don’t bullshit me about what you can do. You only have this much of energy and this much of time. Put your life in order. Cut your workload by half and take care of your spiritual needs or progress. After all, you cannot buy happiness or contentment.”
So I started working on my meditation again. Yes, that is the kind of life I should get back. Meditate sufficiently everyday as I had been doing in the past. Do some social service (in addition to coming out with this paper) as this is vital to one’s spiritual progress.
Thus, this is my fight article. Get back my life article.**
