expiry date

i've read in the papers earlier that the world's oldest man died yesterday, a japanese, he was 113.or simply put it, a mortal with an older-than-usual age just died yesterday.next to 113 or no matter how old, we don't know exactly when, is death. unscheduled, unexpected most of the time but clearly inevitable. we do not have a definite expiry date as compared to food products like canned goods and perishable goods. we will perish without any notification like our monthly bills. and perhaps the most feared aspect of dying is that we do not how we are going to face it, it's not death itself but how we are going to die. majority or almost all would prefer a peaceful death, who wouldn't want that anyway? i share the same desire. death, as peaceful as can be.

the very thought of death, as i've observed and even experienced, drives people to be good and do good. goodness comes out everytime one realizes how short life is, how one has wasted so much time on useless and senseless things, yes, the very thought of death temporarily makes an individual resolve that he has to make use of his time wisely. it's temporary, let's not forget that man is a forgetful being. forgetting is the only thing he doesn't forget. man may be aware of this fact but he, as expected, forgets. as soon as man forgets the reality that he is mortal, he goes back to his old ways. it's a vicious circle of forgetting and realizing that this life is full of limitations.

was Rizal ambidextrous?

let us give some time to reflect on freedom as we commemorate Philippine independence.

i started early today, for morning exercise, biking and jogging. i passed by Naga City Hall, it's near our place, outside the main building is a statue of Rizal with an enlarged right hand making a gesture. The hand wasn't there about ten years ago. i remember we had a good laugh at that statue way back, i was with my grandma and she noticed the unusually big hand newly installed on the right arm of the statue. it doesn't matter if he was right-handed, left-handed, or what do we know? he probably was ambidextrous. i saw paintings where Rizal is writing using his right hand. let's just assume he was right-handed. trivial as it may seem, the point here is that he wrote and by what he wrote, fought for freedom and died for it.patriotic martyrdom as we call it. the absence of his right hand is somehow symbolic, it's more of a call for every citizen to be his right hand, to continue to fight for sacred freedom.

a question arises, for more than a hundred and ten years, are we really free as a nation?

or are we merely enjoying freedom in the nominal sense?

can we gladly claim that we are experiencing actual freedom?or do we just hope for an ideal one and find it impossible since it's becoming a hopeless case as time passes? what is real freedom?

now with Rizal's enlarged right hand, he'd be slapping our faces for what we have done.

freedom is clearly not doing whatever we want or whatever we like to do. for if this is the case, this country would be suffering from chaos. it's happening though, corrupt politicians and various scandals exist. it has always been a struggle for power and different forms of abuse after attaining it. after attaining power, the person experiences unexplainable hunger for more, it's what we call greed. is there any freedom in greed? i don't think so. i remember a cabinet member, who's also an excellent economist, instructing one of his subordinates: 'moderate their greed.' this is already coming from what i believed as a man of good principles. greed or even corruption as an acceptable activity in the government. where the people's taxes go.... moderation of some politician's greed. we can't blame that  economist. the one at the top knows this very well, and probably tolerates greed in moderation. 'Do everything in moderation', as Aristotle would put it, but clearly, not greed. Greed is in itself something you cannot moderate for the fact that it is  greed! Wanting more when one already has enough. But then again, let's not just focus on the government, let's look at individuals, ourselves, and how we apply our shallow understanding of freedom, it's as simple as throwing our trash anywhere we want to. i saw this a lot of times. indolence and making reasons why people can't land a good job. anyway, 'it's the government's fault' is a very handy answer.

'freedom is not doing what we want but what we ought to do.' i believe this is from the late Pope John Paul II. since people/citizens makes a country, we have to work from the individual perspective. if each individual has a clear understanding that the price of freedom is indeed responsibility, we won't have to point our fingers on who's fault is it. it's ours anyway, it was collectively done. this country wouldn't be like this if we didn't permit it to be so.  

for us to truly attain freedom, we have to have an awareness of what it really is and what it entails. and it just doesn't stop with awareness, we also have to act.