29 years for a moment like this: SCUAA 2013 The LNU Way

Occasions like these get to me every time.

There is something about the silence of the waiting moment that’s not unlike a coiled beast ready to spring. It leaves the heart cold with breathless anticipation.

              
With the arrival of the delegates from different SUCs, the heart starts thudding ominously. Here are the athletes, proud representatives of their universities, waving their hats off to their president and to the crowd. They’re saying, Here I am, an athlete of my university, and I’m proud to tell you I come from that school and no place else. And I will do my best to carry its banner high. It is in moments like these that despite our skepticism, we emerge proud of our identities. Nationalism, loyalty, is never more nobly worn than in these instants.

Then the videos are shown. SCUAA history is revealed before us, quite tastefully. Because even though there are some misfires, hitches, what we will most remember is the determination we harbored to see it through to the end. The runner, even if he is tired, will not stop to walk. He may jog, or run quite slower than before, but he will persist, till he passes the torch to others. 

            While you wait, do not forget to breathe. Not yet. Not when the lanterns are lighted, not even when some of them get burned before they reach the sky. Do not lose heart. The lanterns, along with the doves, are our trusting messages to heaven – that though this is essentially a competition, there is room for virtue.

            And there’s the dance. Pure body movement accented by the neon costumes and the flickering lights. My teacher, and one of the masterminds of this dance, Sir Romyr Gabon, told me once that dance, to put it in one word, is simply movement. This seemingly simplistic definition showed its true light in another way: the rhythm of your beating hearts is music enough to accompany your movements. When you see the thousand bodies moving as one, each so like the other but indispensable nevertheless, you don’t think of clones. A thousand bodies moving as one is one body moving to its own music. This is dance in its most primal, most ritualistic form. Be awed.

           
           “Seeing you practicing late at night really broke my heart,” LNU president Dr. Jude Duarte said. What he left out for us to feel was the heartbreak of the real presentation, the culmination of those long months of hard work.

            It took 29 years for LNU to host the biggest sports event in the region. Tonight, we witnessed SCUAA the LNU way. That way may be paved with heartbreak but that is so because of passion always, passion fast forward.

            The burning lanterns. The flickering lights. The doves that might as well have been homing pigeons, the way some of them flew back to whomever set them free. The fireworks that always spell the promise of dreams. And that rare spirit that we mostly find in sports, the esprit de corps, that unites everyone to root for his team and cheer to the others.

No wonder occasions like these get to me. Every single time.

Photos courtesy of LNU -- An Lantawan

Turning Anew (or The Bum Life)

        “What are you doing now?” they ask you. You shrug and say, good-naturedly, “Nothing in particular. I’m a bum.” They raise their eyebrows in good-natured incredulity, but when they see the truth in your insistent smile, they just smile back and move on.

            Sometimes, they probe deeper and ask you why. You answer that you just feel like it, unbelievable as it may seem to them. And that’s that.

          This has been your life for seven months now. A life that has the tinge of excitement into it – the excitement of not knowing where you’ll be at the end of the day, of not following a To-do list, of doing just whatever it is you feel like doing. And for the first time, it’s you who’s on the steering wheel.

            Even now, seven months into the bargain, this life has not lost its thrill for you. The boxes of books that have been waiting for you are now humored – in fact, they are your new chums. You see the world anew – without all the hurry, without the preoccupations, with all the time in the world. And why not? You deserve this after all. There’s no guilt there whatsoever.

            So imagine, for a moment, that you chose a path other than this. That you are now as successful as the others, that every morning you hurry to your office or your classroom to start the day ahead instead of that other life where every morning you will only be heading to sleep, having been up all night to watch the silent, enduring stars, or wonder at how the moon could change and its mystery stay the same, or have your fourth cup of coffee while typing away at your laptop. That while your former carefree friends are talking about job interviews and salaries, you join the conversation with a few anecdotes of your own, instead of only listening and thinking of how you’re going to get the next raket to tide your expenses. Because you realize that the bum life is not bountiful. But you say it doesn’t matter, because you shall get something from it, something you need to deal with all the noise later.

            But. When the instinctive question about a person is, What is he doing?, it is felt that he will not be found to be, like most of us, doing nothing in particular. There is an indefinite sense that he must be invading some region of singularity, good or bad. The devout hope is that he is doing well. The secret faith is that he is making a mess of it… if he were making a fortune and a name, so much better for him; if he were making a tragical figure in the world, so much the better for a narrative. So says Clym Yeobright in Thomas Hardy’s The Return of the Native. How very fitting that you should read it at this time of your life.

            Because you know yourself that you want to be like your former classmates who are so sure of where they are going, who tread a straight path and do not veer away from it. Because beneath the excitement of your life, you know there is the ennui of knowing that tomorrow you walk the same uncertain path. And you want your life to turn just the way it did before, turning normally, turning regularly clockwise.

            But. Let’s say the gift you gave yourself is courage. To fathom your depths, testing how much they can hold. To live like most people outside your former world do, just plodding along, plodding forward, wherever that may be. To chuck the fear.

            Then, humbly I say to you, join me.