Life is Beautiful

(Chanarian, Basco, Batanes)

Yesterday, I and a group of friends trooped to Los Banos, Laguna to attend M's graduation ceremony.  (Or at least attempted to, as we decided to leave even before the one and a half hours entrance march of the graduates and faculty was over.)  

My heart was filled with gladness and pride as I looked at him, clad in Barong Tagalog and wearing medals of distinction for academic excellence and outstanding performance as an international student. No, I am not M's mom or even blood relative although if I'd have a second son I wish I'd have someone like him.  And no, it's not the awards he earned that make me wish so but what he has made of himself despite a tough life journey. Tears still form in my eyes and lump in my throat when I think of M's story. 

M reminds me of M. Scott Peck's famous first line in his book, The Road Less Traveled: "Life is difficult. This is a great truth, one of the greatest truths. It is a great truth because once we truly see this truth, we transcend it." 

It would have been so easy to simply hate the world and fall into a victim stance.  Abandoned by his father and the father's family, at some point emotionally neglected by a mother who was also going through her own pains, and with limited financial support from his maternal grandmother, M left his homeland to go to the Philippines to study with the help of a loving support system.  A brilliant young man, M managed to get accepted to the country's premier state university.   It was not a happy-ever-after life since though.  Aside from financial challenges and visa problems he had to face, there were cultural and language barriers he had to struggle with. 

Life was indeed not easy for M but he took things in stride and made the best of his situation. Faced with visa problems due to the inefficiency of immigration staff and some financial challenges, he had to stop schooling for a semester.  Instead of bumming around as some would have done, he whiled away his time as an office volunteer in our unit. Sometimes I'd wonder where people like M draw their strength from. Sometimes in quiet thought I'd think of how much faith he must have had in himself, in the support of his Filipino family, and in life.  Many times I would look at him and wish that I will have the same tenacity, that those of us who go through tough times will choose to allow the situation to bring out the better rather than the bitter in us.  Here's one man  whose life choices affirm the truth that life is difficult but one worth the journey because life is also beautiful. 

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,

And sorry I could not travel both

And be one traveler, long I stood

And looked down one as far as I could

To where it bent in the undergrowth; 

Then took the other, as just as fair,

And having perhaps the better claim

Because it was grassy and wanted wear,

Though as for that the passing there

Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay

In leaves no step had trodden black.

Oh, I kept the first for another day! 

Yet knowing how way leads on to way

I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh

Somewhere ages and ages hence:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I,

I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference.  

(Robert Frost, The Road Not Taken)