I have been trying to live my life differently. I’ve tried to accept the Platonic challenge[1]. I’ve tried to follow Scott Peck’s (and Matthew Kelly) and James Hollis’s guidance to live life vigourously; but I’m aware that I am running out of time and then I remind myself when I get discouraged or bogged down of Dylan Thomas’s anger.
Still, it might be nice to have a home to come home to.
I set down in the previous chapters some of the Lessons Learned of the Philippines. But what have I learned about myself? And have I been able to convey some of what I have learned to my readers? Indeed, what hubris for me to think they would want to know what I had learned.
I suppose every country and society has these social contrasts but in The Philippines they are often dramatic and you wonder how stable the social fabric is.
I had come to Philippines to learn about the country and the people, its clichés and its paradoxes, to prove to others that I could understand, and to learn something about myself.
One goal is output – not the ambitious thousand words a day, more like five hundred. In any event, a thousand words a day is pointless if it’s mostly crap. I think of Hemingway at his typewriter, tearing pages out of his carriage and filling his wastepaper basket, so much more visceral than modern hard drives. I’ve learned to be content with merely a decent paragraph, and just walk away.
And what do we learn from all this Trivia? That The Philippines is a country of contrasts, a curious combination of west and east, old and modern. Of tradition and of a rapidly changing society. And it gives me pause to consider aspects of my own life in Canada.
Family is big in the Philippines and it’s not a cliché. Not only are the families big but the value ‘family’ is big. It’s a specific cultural condition widely understood by Filipinos. That doesn’t mean they all get along but they certainly know where everybody lives.
A big part of the reality of The Philippines are calamities, of which the Philippines experience a couple every year, and some years those calamities make world head-lines. The Filipinos mostly take these calamities in stride, but even for them, some of these are wrenching.
Maybe I was living a romantic fantasy of my hero of the Pacific, a vague notion of walking in the footsteps of history. I was returning to Philippines, maybe to find happiness with my own Filipina companion.
Travels With Myself has a different purpose than The Pilipiñas Packet; Travels is the account of my journey of self-discovery and transition in the twilight of my life. The Packet recounts tour of The Philippines but was as much a vehicle for discovering myself, as it was for having a life experience.
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