"Closing cycles"

I rarely duplicate a blog or a written piece, but when I come across a great writing, I can't help but share it with my readers.

After coming back from a well deserved vacation, I am barraged with work. It's why I dread vacations. There's more work that awaits me on my return. While it pays for food on the table or for the clothes on my back or even for a lavish vacation, I cannot help but feel that a part of me is tired.

Yup. Tired. Tired of the mundane and petty problems that you encounter each day. Tired of the routine work - seeing patients, going to the office, teaching students, seeing patients, attending meetings, signing checks, reviewing papers, seeing patients, getting text messages from parents who wait gazillion years for the evolution of the infection in their kids in the middle of the night, attending meetings...you know the drill.

While I subconsciously chant - "I owe, I owe, so off to work I go..." - I cannot help but be tired and weary. After all, it seems that I've been doing this my lifetime. I have a feeling I'm about to explode.

As I write this blog, the rain seems to be filling up the waters on the streets and hopefully, Angat Dam. The dreary weather in Manila seems to aggravate the hopefully, temporary depressive moments of life.

I dug into my bucket of quotes for the day, waiting for an uplifting moment...but the sparkle was just not there. What happened? Where was it?

I know I am not alone in situations like these. We all have these "moments". But we all need a push to face the door and overcome this mundane world, searching for a meaning even during the twilight years.

A friend had sent me this link on a piece written by Paulo Coehlo, one of my favorite writers. The title says it all. And while it may present a somber atmosphere to what I am feeling today, it gives me the courage to take the day a bit further and look forward tomorrow, no matter how weary it gets.

I hope you all like it the way I did. No one could have better said this than Coehlo...


One always has to know when a stage comes to an end.

If we insist on staying longer than the necessary time, we lose the happiness and the meaning of the other stages we have to go through.

Closing cycles, shutting doors, ending chapters - whatever name we give it, what matters is to leave in the past the moments of life that have finished.

Did you lose your job? Has a loving relationship come to an end? Did you leave your parents' house? Gone to live abroad? Has a long-lasting friendship ended all of a sudden? You can spend a long time wondering why this has happened.

You can tell yourself you won't take another step until you find out why certain things that were so important and so solid in your life have turned into dust, just like that. But such an attitude will be awfully stressing for everyone involved: your parents, your husband or wife, your friends, your children, your sister - everyone will be finishing chapters, turning over new leaves, getting on with life, and they will all feel bad seeing you at a standstill.

None of us can be in the present and the past at the same time, not even when we try to understand the things that happen to us. What has passed will not return: we cannot forever be children, late adolescents, sons that feel guilt or rancor towards our parents, lovers who day and night relive an affair with someone who has gone away and has not the least intention of coming back.

Things pass, and the best we can do is to let them really go away. That is why it is so important (however painful it may be!) to destroy souvenirs, move, give lots of things away to orphanages, sell or donate the books you have at home.

Everything in this visible world is a manifestation of the invisible world, of what is going on in our hearts - and getting rid of certain memories also means making some room for other memories to take their place.

Let things go. Release them. Detach yourself from them. Nobody plays this life with marked cards, so sometimes we win and sometimes we lose. Do not expect anything in return, do not expect your efforts to be appreciated, your genius to be discovered, your love to be understood.

Stop turning on your emotional television to watch the same program over and over again, the one that shows how much you suffered from a certain loss - that is only poisoning you, nothing else. Nothing is more dangerous than not accepting love relationships that are broken off, work that is promised but there is no starting date, decisions that are always put off waiting for the "ideal moment."

Before a new chapter is begun, the old one has to be finished: tell yourself that what has passed will never come back.

Remember that there was a time when you could live without that thing or that person - nothing is irreplaceable, a habit is not a need. This may sound so obvious, it may even be difficult, but it is very important.

Closing cycles.

Not because of pride, incapacity or arrogance, but simply because that no longer fits your life.

Shut the door, change the record, clean the house, shake off the dust. Stop being who you were, and change into who you are.


And I start this today...tomorrow, will after be a new day, a new cycle begins. And soon it will be time to close another cycle and begin another one...again...