Sunday, December 27, 2009

looking back, looking forward

A friend of mine got his planner today. It's the Starbucks one, the one everyone keeps dissing since we all remember how great a deal it was before. The one that had its "buy 1-take 1" stubs replaced with monthly discounted coffee bags. The one that isn't leather anymore. The one that grew pale and drowned in the inundated market of mimicry and sticker-books from shifty competition. The one we look at, contemptuous, from the perspective of the past and whisper quietly to the nouveau coffee-fiends, "We've seen better."

But, to my friend, it didn't seem so shoddy. It was tastefully packaged in red, wrapped in thin muslin, precious and new and so full of blank pages brimming with invisible opportunities. To him, it was his first planner, the catalogue-to-be of his first year at work, recorder of the dream that is his life right now.

And maybe that's the truth in all things that shift and change in the river that is the life we all live. That in our flawed humanity we, in our ingrained disdain for failure and disappoint, tend to focus unconsciously upon the lost endings instead of burgeoning beginnings. We get so obsessed in the should, we make the mistake of missing all that could.

We fascinate ourselves, I think, with the horse's mouth's every detail in the utter folly and misplaced faith that all of life's unintended prizes lies within them an explanation, a rationale on why we're so fortunate or unfortunate. I say rub its neck, listen to her whiny in consent, claim her and journey further into the mysterious valleys destiny has to offer.

2 comments:

  1. starbucks planner is a way of showing everyone na addicted ka sa coffee and "in ka".. kc may planner ka. mga pinoy tlga :D

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  2. Funny, I also got one. After all these years, I have never once fully used any of my planners, there was this occasional doodle or two but never continuously. I get it from my sis who's so shot up with caffeine, she's.....For me, the Starbucks planner is the symbol of how we, as a people, find our place in the world. But I suppose some would say its the shackle by which imperial america has imprisoned us. Either way, choose your delusion.

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