Observer Editorial

RENEWAL

 

We begin the New Year with a note of hope.

 

We begin it as well with the commitment that this hope that resides in us will continue to spring eternal and that, unlike the challenges that we had to contend with last year, it will not push us against the wall.

 

For in these difficult circumstances we are in, this sense of hope is what makes sense to the already senseless events and news and realities that bombard us each day, deadening our sense of the morrow, and numbing us to become unaware that there is grace in life, however inchoate this grace is insofar us our set of expectations is concerned.

 

The whole gamut of meanings that we can draw up as we transition to the new year is encapsulated in that very sense of hope that we keep deep in our heart and soul: each of us, with that sense always the anchor upon which we secure our commitment to struggle for something better, something truer, something more beautiful even as we become witnesses to the opposite of what we least want to see.

 

The times are dire.

 

The times are difficult, very difficult.

 

The times of our lives are not memorable in the sense of their being joyous, as they should be, as we expect them to be, as we want them to be.

 

The times of our going through the motions of living life everyday under the threat of foreclosures and recession and job losses and all other trying circumstances are not what we Filipino Americans came to America for.

 

Certainly, we were expecting something grander, something rosier as soon as we took the first step on that plane ride to this country. In that first step was our living and huge dream of making it—as all other people in the past, remote and immediate, have dreamed.

 

But herein comes the double-edged sword threatening our existence, and threatening the life of our dreams.

 

Here is where the need for us to hold on to that dream so that it becomes immediate, urgent.

 

Here is where our capacity for the testing of our mettle comes to the rescue, with our inner force from our ability to hope for something better the proof of that capacity.

 

Whoever says that joy is only defined by our being under the warm and bright sun?

 

Joy is also dancing in the rain, and committing to memory each moment of that act of dancing—our own dancing—in the rain.

 

This New Year then requires a renewal on our part, one from our relentless act of hoping, one from our ability to dance in the rain, and enjoy that dance of our life.

 

We wish you the kindness and blessing of the times. 

 

We wish you a blessed renewal the new times offer. 

A. Solver Agcaoili

Fil-Am Observer Editorial

Hon, HI/Jan 2009