winning

photo from bing ramos

when i was younger, i always thought that the key to winning at life was always to become successful - at least in the traditional way that my parents viewed success. i can't even count the many car drives with my dad when i didn't receive a lecture (sometimes welcome, sometimes not really) about succeeding. my parents are both successful in their own right, i suppose. they came from very poor backgrounds, and through will, hard work, brains and balls, they managed to leave the small ponds they were born into and become relatively big fish in relatively bigger ponds. i don't begrudge them of that. i've always been grateful of how comfortable our lives were, how very different from the time when they were growing up. there were so many things that were given to me as a product of their hard work - countless pesos and hours spent on every lesson imaginable (ballet, art, swimming, theater, piano, voice, speed reading); many, many plays and musicals seen, many hoity-toity restaurants dined at, many trips to so many colorful places, many nights slept away in airconditioned coolness, many days spared from the frenzy that is the manila commute. i have been given all of that, and i will be forever grateful.


i am thinking about these things right now because i question if this definition of success is what i need to be following. after hard times this year, i have found it very difficult to pick myself up again. it feels like a chore even just to wake up, and days go by with an overwhelming sense of loss.

i spent whole days wondering why it was that i spent 7 years of my life pursuing something that never grew on me. i wonder still if it is me who is wrong for it, or if i went to the wrong place to do the learning that i needed to do. i did it because i thought it was the straightest path to my parents' dream of success for me. they no longer asked me do it, but i thought if i could, and i was there anyway, didn't i owe it to them to buckle down and have a crack at a respectable job? maybe it was my method, maybe it was my lack of drive for the things i was reading, maybe it was my inability to think my decisions through - but i have failed at the thing i that i have been the most miserable for. and though i need to pass only one test to be able to succeed at this particular endeavor - having gone through the pain of graduating, after all, i feel so much farther from success now than ever before. 

today as i found myself in a room with people i didn't want to be with, i felt overcome by this feeling of defeat. i was in a room with people whom i felt had wanted me to lose the most. it was painful, it was humiliating, and very much like a loser i skulked out of there as quietly as i could.

and so now i spent whole days, weeks even, just thinking. i'm still thinking about that feeling, even now. will it make me feel better just to succeed at that one endeavor? how does one really win at life?

i think about all the stories my parents have told me about the time when they were poor, and while i sit in our lovely house, all alone, i wonder if they aren't happier when they were poorer than they are now, when we are better off. i remember all the stories they told of simple pleasures, afternoons spent in too small rooms packed with too many people. we started off like that - living in a tiny house filled to the brim with my mother's relatives. it seemed to be a tougher time, but i can honestly say that i remember more happy times during those years of struggle than i do now.

our house feels really empty now. living in it feels joyless. the people in it are always tired and cranky and at each other's throats. we have so much more now, but in our efforts to hang on to it, we lost something else. apart from me, and only because i am the one person in our house who no longer has anything to lose, there is no more time for stillness, for conversations that don't involve work even. i sit alone in our house and have conversations with myself about how it is that i think i will win at life, very much like i am now.

i had this thought today, and i'm not sure when exactly it came to me, but i think it is apt for this particular post. the only way to really win at life is to spend each day deliberately, doing only what you love and nothing more. i don't know how this will translate to my own life, but i hope that as i continue to think about my life and how to live it, that i remember this when i think of my own definition of success. success to me, right now, is just spending every minute of every day doing what i love to do. now, if i could only find that out, i would be set.