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We have all met them. Men and women who are tired and
bored with life, people who cannot seem to get excited about much of
anything. The enthusiasm and vigor we had expected of people who are
healthy and reasonably well off are not there.
They seem to be counting the days
and waiting for something to happen that would light up their world.
They have lost the ability to get excited. Even in parties and happy
gatherings, they stand out in the crowd with their droopy look.
What’s wrong with these sad
faces? They are people who perhaps have been hurt emotionally and
are taking forever to recover. Maybe there is something that is
buried deep in the past that haunts them and keeps them from
enjoying life. Perhaps it is ongoing conflicts they cannot seem to
resolve and that keep them focused on the negatives that life deals
them.
I remember a beautiful woman who
always seemed to be angry. She was, in fact, always angry. Deeply
offended by a neighbor, she was obsessed with her and did everything
to take her down. When she wasn’t actively engaged in conflict,
she was planning the next one. It got to the point when she became
so depressing that she lost most of her friends and was left pretty
much alone to fight her enemy.
So many people give up on life.
They stop dreaming, stop growing and eventually stop living. They
exist, but there’s more to life than breathing, eating, sleeping
and going to work.
If we truly want to get the most
out of life, if we want to live and not merely walk around in a
daze, we must keep growing as persons. Our growth must happen on the
emotional, intellectual and spiritual levels. We cannot allow
ourselves to believe that as we get older, we need no longer exert
efforts to grow and instead sit in the garden and watch the flowers
grow.
There are millions of ways to
grow, right up to the day we die. Age may slow you down physically,
but emotionally, intellectually and spiritually you can become a
giant. Growth is to the mind, the spirit and the soul, what exercise
is to the body. The more, the better. The more you use it, the
stronger it becomes. The less you use it, the more it deteriorates.
The young too can get old inside
themselves even as their bodies remain strong. You see them all the
time hanging around in the malls and at home, bored with themselves
and the world, sitting around not knowing what to do with
themselves. They are alive but look like the walking dead. They
shuffle along like old men and women. They have no dreams, few
expectations. They are pleasure seekers who feed the senses but
starve the mind, the spirit and the soul.
In her book, The Steep Ascent,
Anne Marrow Lindberg described them well:
“People ‘died’ all the time
in their lives. Parts of them died when they made the wrong kind of
decisions— decisions against life. Sometimes they died bit by bit
until finally they were just living corpses walking around. If you
were perceptive, you could see it in their eyes; the fire had gone
out . . .
But you always knew when you made
a decision against life. When you denied life, you were warned. The
cock crowed, always, somewhere inside you. The door clicked and you
were safe inside—safe and dead.”
You can be one of the walking
dead or you can be one of those George Bernard Shaw refers to when
he wrote about those who make it in this world: “People are always
blaming their circumstances for what they are. I don’t believe in
circumstances. People who get on in this world are the people who
get up and look for the circumstances they want, and, if they
can’t find them, make them.”
If you have problems about
drugs, alcohol and behavior/attitude call my office at 820-6107 or
825-1771 or e-mail me at gvcbuenca@vasia.com or write me at P.O. Box
2099 MCPO, Makati City.
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