Love is a Responsibility.

Last night, I watched Atom Araullo's Philippine Seas documentary and I felt a mix of delight and heartbreak. Delight - that our country is blessed with marine biodiversity and heartbreak - that people failed to take care of them. Now, travel is a must have thing. We have lots of places to check in our bucketlist. Now, food is a must try thing. We have lots of restaurants and hidden gems that we must visit, lots of bookmarked recipes we need to cook. Food and travel. A millenial's lifestyle.

We often describe ourselves or post these words to social media pages - "I love food", "YOLO - Travel", "Foodgasm", "Travel is the best learning experience". We love foods. We love travel. But then our love is a selfish type. Our love only fills our need, our greed, our boredom and at the other side of the rainbow, we irresponsibly eat and travel. We eat greedily without knowing bees are losing their habitats, seafoods are caught in an unimaginable amount sometimes illegally, livestocks leave tons of carbon footprints. All of these just to satisfy our hunger. We travel and sees the the world has to offer but we fail to reciprocate and offer the world our mind to preserve its beauty. We just travel. Take pictures of it. Post it to social media, felt happy, blessed. And then we never took notice of the garbage we dispose and where they go, the carbon footprints we produce by using cars, fuels, etc.   

We failed to take responsibility to our love. We take away the beauty of this world and never offered it our mind to preserve it. Let us be reminded that we are only a part of this world. We may be the smartest race to have evolved but great power comes with great responsibility. Let us never forget that we are a community and it is our responsibility to take care of nature. Just like how a car enthusiast loves his car - taking care of it day and night, let's love responsibly - dig deeper and know more of nature, eat and travel that balances what is took and what is produced.

Start small.

"Big things often have small beginnings."

One of my end goals in life is to have a small house with a big farm. I have always dreamt of planting vegetables I would cook and imagined eating with a bunch of flowers decorating my table. It was my end goal. I am thinking it will happen sometime in the future and for now, I would just live in a bedspace in Manila, with little greens around me.

One night, I cooked a dish with a green onion on it. With the influence of YouTube, it hit my head that we can put the roots in a jar of water and let it grow. I did it out of whim and few days later, I got home to my province and forget that I put the green onion roots on the water. When I came back after two weeks, I was surprised to see that my green onion was moved to a pot by our landlady and that it has two new green sprouts on it! Gleeful, I took a photo of it (the one above).

What I realized is that we may have big dreams, big aspirations in our mind that we think we can only do in the future because we are not yet capable now. But, we can start small, like my farm, I can start planting little garnish greens (green onions, basil) and invest in what I only have now. The important thing is we started, we began to do something with our dream and little by little it is coming true.

Live less. Observe more.

Roaming the house - there's television on the living room; tables and cellphones are being charged because it was exhausted from being used all day; airconditioner, fluffy pillows and comforter on the bedroom; elaborate curtains hid the scenery from outside; groceries with lots of foods stocked on the cabinet and refrigerator; cars filled the garage of the front house.

I felt very comfortable on this setup and isn't it a good thing? I can watch TV when I'm bored; I can connect to the wifi and see all things amusing in the Internet; I can sleep heavily till midday; I can eat whenever I want or I am bored :P Yes, I was truly blessed but I think somewhat this comfort led me to become less observant of nature, to connect with it. Why? Because I can just live my life comfortably inside the house, I became blind living on my own terms.

That is why I visioned that if I am to build my own house there will be a small house with a large space for greens. There will be large glass windows with thin curtains so sunlight can go through and I can always see the beauty of nature. There's bicycle so I can roam the streets with the breeze, chit chat with nearby neighbors. There's less, so I can observe more - slowly sipping my cup of coffee in front of the garden early in the morning (because sunlight woke me up) or gazing at the beauty of the universe at night on the balcony.

The Money Game

When I opened a new savings account to hold my extra earnings, the teller asked me if I was interested to open a Unit Investment Trust Fund(UITF) instead. She insisted on the benefits and higher return rate I could get if I opt instead for the latter but I refused, giving myself some time to think it through. When I go wander to that moment and ponder, it's funny how money controls us in what I coined as its 'Money Game'.

We unknowingly played it all along and the Game Master were the business people, the bank people. Through time it evolved to make us work harder and harder for a future of materialism. First level, we need to work to earn money and buy our needs. That's okay. Second level, we need to work harder or longer to earn more money and buy our wants (Yey! we get a shot of short-term happiness). Third level, we need to open up a savings account to save money and prepare for the uncertainties the future brings. With this, we actualized in our mind to be ruled out by money, to let it control our life, to be crippled by it and chase it. The game never ends, it keeps on evolving. The fourth level lashed out the safety net 'savings account' will shield for the future's uncertainty, now they are instilling that its gonna be beaten by inflation and we need to go opt for stocks and UITF that now will give us the safety net.

Will the chase for higher interest rates and bigger income come to an end? Will it while they keep on advertising artificial needs, securities, and wants?  

Abstraction.

I came upon a video about Django ORM explaining the importance of knowing your tools not just using it.

I watched Youtube videos documenting how we are losing bees which are necessary for pollination.

At first, these two events seems unrelated with each other but when I think about it they both scream out the word 'Abstraction.' In computing, it just mean being able to do things without diving too deep into the technical parts. In modern era, as our good ancestors do not want us to suffer the way they did, they made abstraction for things. In Django, so we do not need to handle painstakingly SQL statements, they created the Django ORM. In consumerism, businessmen offered abstraction by delivering right in our doors, in our mobile phones, in the supermarkets, products that we can buy and consume easily. They made it easy but they made us blind also. We always tend to take things for granted. We have ORMs that made CRUD easier, so why bother digging further to SQL. Our fruits can be easily picked from the supermarket, so why bother knowing how they were delivered and produced.  We are dumb and irresponsible for taking these things for granted. Great powers come with great responsibility. Our lives are made easier but we must allot some of these made-free time to dive into what abstraction made hidden. A last sentence to ponder:

"Do we know that our greedy population, eating too much, building too much space for us to live have destructed the ecosystem bees needed in order to live? Do we even care or know that they are the keys for producing the fruit we pick in the market? Or we just don't care, hell, I'll just pick and eat?"

Protection.

If you want to protect the weak, you have to be strong first. How can you protect them if you are weak yourself? How can you protect them if you do not have enough knowledge to defend them against people who benefit from knowing how to play the game. It is unacceptable to stay ignorant and nonchalant when you know something is wrong and it is failure to be defeated in conflicts you just flee from, knowing in yourself that you could have done something more if you have enough power and used that power to defend what should be defended.

Artificial Needs.

Traversing EDSA on a common weekend, I saw billboards on my hindsight - beauty products, shoe brands and go to restaurants were among them. Businesses thrive from its customers and from this arise the challenge on how to attract and maintain its customers. They need to highlight their product and differentiate it against its competitors, they impose fear to create artificial needs in order to gain customers. They create consumerism. They create the illusion that we need those items. They ask us to buy more, to earn more money, to chase money in order to have those artificial needs. Those artificial needs were superbly and strategically advertised in our daily lives - commercials, billboards, online advertisements that it successfully penetrated our mind that we feel unsatisfied and inferior if we haven't bought them because we think its a need. Think deeply of those fears they have made - retirement with no money, death with no insurance, being late because of traffic, living uncomfortably, staying up-to-date and connected. Think of the needs it makes - insurance, car, condominium, cellphones. Sometimes, we are chasing money to afford those that we made ourselves blind of the big picture - living in harmony with our planet and saving it from the long term effect of consumerism.

Every Little Thing Needs Love.

We often end our day feeling unsatisfied. We drift away our minds and think of the future - of what we want to be, what we should be doing next, of what to buy next, to satisfy that hole within us. We dig the past and felt unsatisfied for what we could have done, what might we been. But what if instead of living our lives digging the past we cannot change and drifting to the future that is uncertain to happen, we live in the present? A life mindful of the present, feeling the air we breathe in and out, giving our attention and love to little things that needs it - to the house needing cleaning, to the pet that longs for a touch, to the plant begging for a taste of water, to a stranger passing by our life. We need not to be on top of our company, a superstar,  search for that next big volunteering activity nor save up big digits in our savings account to help. In our everyday living, there are little things that needs our love and extra time. We become less bitter to the life we are living in if the satisfaction comes from us giving love to those little things and at the same time, a less bitter world if those little things received love.

Above all, send the bees love. Every little things wants to be loved. - Sue Monk Kidd, The Secret Life of Bees