Life lessons

If you’ve ever felt you’ve become stuck in a spot in your life and you don’t like it, you might want to take a look at a process I’ve recently started, known broadly as “life-coaching.”

For me, it’s another dimension of learning and understanding that’s become much more important as I’ve gotten older, and the number of years I have already lived begin to outnumber the years I probably have left. There was a clear moment when, reading up on negotiation skills to prepare to reach a contract deal with a former employer, I got to a chapter about how to work out your own bottom line. There were two exercises in particular that were like a clarion call to live better. The first asked me to rank in importance, on a scale of 1 to 10, factors such as: time with your family, time with friends, fame, providing for your family, health, etc. The second asked me to imagine my own funeral at which someone from my family, another person from my work life and another from my community would speak about me – what would I want them to say about me?

My life at the time was being lived at an extremely rapid pace, anchoring live newscasts encompassing content from all over the world for an international broadcaster in a rather competitive environment, running a home with very young children and a mostly absent husband who was covering conflicts around the world. It was as if I was hearing someone knocking at a door in my mind, and realizing it was me.

The knocking became more insistent over the years, so much so that I could no longer set it aside and began to plan and organize my life much more specifically to meet my goals. Perhaps I was a particularly madcap youngster, but if you’d asked me 30 years ago about “life goals” I would have looked back at you blankly. I had not yet learned that I didn’t have to careen from one life event to the next and that life didn’t have to be about crisis management, decided by external forces including that mysterious idea of fate.

Fatalism has often been used to described the Filipina/o outlook. It’s a stereotypical view that is nevertheless worth taking a closer look at, whether or not you count yourself as Filipino/a. It belongs to a narrative that goes something like this: We live in an archipelago particularly prone to disaster and to invasion therefore, as a people, we tend not to plan for the future, not to have goals, not to believe we have agency in creating our own futures. What is the point of bothering to spend money and effort on building a present when a typhoon, earthquake or flood is only going to demolish it?

Well, what’s the point of doing anything? I’ve written here before of the horror I felt when faced with the destruction of the main square in Tacloban after Typhoon Yolanda, built with such care, expense and civic pride after the terrible destruction of World War Two. It was appallingly painful to arrive at my grandparents’ old house in Palo which had provided a venue for rebels who fought against the Spanish to found the Philippines in its earliest days, and eventually served as a library for the community. It had been decimated to such an extent we couldn’t even get through the door because of all the stuff behind it. Once we were in, it was impossible to make sense of the destruction. Almost everything had been wrecked. Two oil paintings, portraits of my grandparents Pio and Luisa, by Fernando Amorsolo, did survive. They were kept safe at Palo Cathedral across the road while the town began the long road to recovery.

Another legacy used to be the huge carved wooden doors of the cathedral, which my grandparents had donated many decades before. One of the priests recounted how a national television crew, desperate to find safety from the incoming storm, had crashed into the doors with their van. I am not sure if they ever apologized or compensated the parish.

Fatalism would seem to have a natural home in the Philippines, but so does resilience. Remembering my grandparents’ serene painted faces looking at me among the wreckage of their once beautiful home, I think they would not have accepted disaster as a reason to surrender to “fate.” After all, born in the early years of the 20th century, theirs was the generation that had built the reality of the nation from nothing more than their aspirations. They would have an answer to the question “What is the point of doing anything?”

So how do people become “unstuck” after such a disaster? Or even just wanting, as I did, to identify where I stand and what I aspire to achieve as I look back at the landscape of my life, in much the same way as I looked at the wrecked landscape of Tacloban and Palo.

When it comes to journeys of resilience and self-discovery, whatever your goal may be, it can be pretty tough to figure out how to get from point A (identifying a goal) to point B (actually going after and achieving that goal). I expect I could probably do it myself, but it would take a lot longer, so that’s why I spend a bit of time with a life coach. So far, so good. She is trained to be something like a supportive friend and a trusted adviser rolled into one, who pushes me to identify goals, hold me accountable and provide encouragement throughout the journey to become (I hope) a better version of myself. At least I am sure I will know myself better and see my place in my little corner of the world, in my community and profession, a bit more clearly.

I am ready for it now, mid-life, in a way that I wasn’t when younger, though I do wonder what difference it might have made had I started thinking this way earlier in life. I don’t know yet how this process will end, and it may not be for everyone, but it’s good to learn new ways of getting unstuck.