Choices and chasms

There are 500 things in my mind the moment I wrote this. Actually, I don’t count. Things mount up and ideas branch up from one stem of thought to another, so branding figures on a state of mind is futile. Putting 500, I figured, is more suitable. It gives you the impression that you’re not looking at life as a cluttered calendar while it leaves you an assurance that you’re completely in touch with your surroundings.

I read in a medical journal that we make at least 2,500 decisions every day. Some of these stem from mundane issues that take split seconds to digest like where to sit in a jeepney or how strong you wish to close a door. The rest are crucial and life-altering decisions that need even weeks of scheming or analysis. I would love to think that the split-second-choices make up 2,000 of the 2,500 daily choices we make. I set the 500 aside for my mind to explore, although I myself believe that most of these slip my mind.

It was the author J. K. Rowling who wrote, “It is our choices, far more than our abilities that show us who we really are.” This is not an attempt to defend mediocrity, rather, this highlights our power to use these certain ‘abilities’ to change our lives and others, lay a happy and satisfying future, or even heal the world.

If you look at it, the world is like a web where each one of us is entitled to another. One small decision could set off a portent chain of events that could change other people’s lives in ways we never imagined – or intended.

Did the mother, who locked her children at home from the outside to make sure that they don’t stray while she goes to the market, considered that this gesture of security and love will result in the cruel end of her children perishing over an accidental fire?

Have the Filipinos accepted the fact that more than twice, they chose to vote for household names to seat in the government and eventually, they themselves end up complaining and attempting to topple these said politicians? Or have you wondered about the unborn child whose parents decided to let go, that he could be the next president of the country, because they’re afraid of the consequence of their own mistakes and they want to finish college to earn good careers?

Choices are infinite, and even the smallest scenarios we let slip through our fingers could define our lives and our future. If this medical report of 2,500 decisions is accurate and therefore effective, it tells us how much the world changes in one revolution. Figure out the world population times 2,500 decisions and that huge number tells you how “change” that we all wanted could easily transpire once we all work out together for good.

It is your choice then to choose well and wisely. It is disturbing that all decisions we make could shake the rest of the world but it is a reminder that you do have the power to bring this chaotic state of the world to an end. You may be one, but you have at least 2,500 chances everyday to make everyone better – at least – according to science.

Someone who chose to fight for the country till death said, “The Filipino is worth dying for.” With our own sets of 2,500 choices daily, how will you prove him right?

Borderlines

Is it really possible to be confined in a world of your own, where everything happening is your own thread and every person is attached to that?

I watched Shutter Island in the deep of the night, after reading Brave New World (the powerful, mind-boggling futuristic classic by Aldous Huxley). Directed by Martin Scorsese and based upon the complex genius of author Dennis Lehane (Mystic River, The Given Day) of the same title, this movie steps forward with A-List actors Leonardo DiCaprio, Mark Rufallo, and Ben Kingsley.

It is the year 1945 and US Marshall Edward “Teddy” Daniels (DiCaprio) and newly assigned partner Chuck Aule (Ruffalo) are placed to investigate the escape of a Rachel Solando, a patient/inmate at the Ashecliff Hospital in Shutter Island. Inmates (or patients, as the doctors would prefer to call them) here are the criminally insane and it is said to be the one of its kind in the world.

As their investigation sets on a tragic trance and Daniels starts to have unpleasant flashbacks, he also revels in his personal cause of revenging his wife who was killed by another inmate in the island, Andrew Laeddis.

As his personal complexities and the island seem to bare its true colors, Daniels realize that he is in an impasse where all the people around him—doctors and nurses and patients included—are against him. He finds out a medical scheme within the shores: of patients getting harsh and inhumane operations, and the real Rachel Solando—not a patient, but a doctor who also finds out this plan.

Daniels race to save himself and his partner from this tragedy but he is confronted by the island’s doctor (Kingsley) that he has no partner. Daniels was confronted by the doctor of being a patient in the island himself for two years, a once Marshall who killed his wife after she killed their three children. In fact, Andrew Laeddis is the anagram of Edward Daniels; and Chuck Aule is really a Dr. Sheehan, his psychiatrist. The doctor explained their “role-playing” as a way to help Daniels realize (lobotomy is the last resort) the reality and to make them achieve his cure—being the most dangerous patient in the island.

He accepted this although the next day, he fell back to his usual trance and called Dr. Sheehan as Chuck. The movie ends with Daniels being led for the lobotomy.

What struck me odd is this—is the mind really so weak and powerful all at the same time to not accept its sores, yet he can manage to set up his own version of things? I did not really understand the command to which Daniels bear, not until the end when the truth is rushing down on his character. I think it takes a real man to accept his defeat and accept the way things go. As it turned out, Daniels is a bigger man who has to erase the failure of a supposed-to-be good family and honest-to-goodness career. Would it really look good for a US Marshall to have a psycho-wife who killed her family? What dad would not turn mad when in his return to his home, he found out that his wife killed their children?

I think what scares the viewers of this movie is not about how the character of Daniels, the smart, ungiving Marshall, turned out to be psycho. There is a relief actually in the fact that even the most brilliant among us have issues to go on through. The real score is that insanity is not really an option of life—it is borderline. It is something that we also experience, something we revel to. Insanity, in my opinion, is not a sickness. It is a defense mechanism where we give our real selves up to find your real “you.” What sets us apart only is how much this insanity is left on everyone of us, and how dangerous it could be.

As the DVD ended that evening I watched it, I thought about how Daniels would be after the lobotomy. Will he really be happy to be back in the cruel chasms of reality—or will he be suffering more for those memories? Think about it.

I read in a book before that insanity is something people condemn, not because it’s dangerous or scary. It is because everyone of us knows that there is an insane part of us, a tiger waiting to be uncaged. It’s just something we are afraid to set loose.

If you think about it, we’re all mad here. And between us and them, they’re the happier ones.

Our lives are seasons, waiting

For Irvin.
Happy birthday.

Our lives are seasons, waiting,
The sun in haze and sultry.
The sphere to which her light conjures,
Is a passive sight of a Sunday.

Her hands are wavering toss of waves,
And they soothe a dry, crisp desert.
But Life is one bigger complement,
Than the chances we have in seasons.

Had the rain subside to let streams level,
Our voyage stripped and bland.
So I'd rather wait for the next blue winter,
Before spring takes all the same old span.

/August 16, 2010.