luck. swerte. chamba.

(this is just a rehased version of an idea that was presented during a speech given during this afternoon’s high school graduation at ateneo. it ended up quite long, no?) 

i never considered myself to be a person who had much going for him. i’m just your average joe in almost anything you can think of. probably even a "loser" in grade school and high school standards. i never excelled academically although i never failed any subject as well. i’m average looking at best, but i don’t think i’m ugly. i have no exceptional talents whatsoever, but i’m decent in a lot of things. i’m also a klutz and something of a scatterbrain, but i have my moments. i’m not at all a social being, but i have a handful of friends that i really am thankful for.

no, this is not a pity entry. no, not at all. i look back at my life, what i’ve been and what i’ve been through. then i look at my life right now and think "how did i end up here"? this here place where i’m in… it’s not heaven-on-earth, but it’s a good place. but how did i get here? luck. swerte. chamba.

my parents were never well-off. you could even say that for they most-part, they were just getting by. when they were my age right now, they were just newlyweds struggling to make it in the world. five years later, they were first-time parents still struggling to make it in the world. my mom would go around office-to-office in makati as a shoe saleslady and she’d take me along. my dad was just your typical struggling engineer. but for some bizarre reason, they always just had enough to make it through whatever we had to go through. and that meant sending all their kids to the best schools from preschool to college. i spent 16 years in ateneo. my sister spent most of her student life in miriam, and my bro is taking the same route as me. we were never rich. arguably just middle-class. maybe even lower-middle-class. but for some amazing reason we all got by. "ginapang lang" is the appropriate phrase for how we were all put through school. for some reason, we always had just enough. luck. swerte. chamba.

in my 16 years in ateneo, i never excelled academically. i never got a first honor award. i got a handful of second honors, which turned into mere honorable mentions as early as grade 3… and then after that, totally nothing. in all my graduations - grade school, high school and college - the only times my name was mentioned was when i was called to receive my diploma. but then, it’s a noteworthy thing to mention that i never failed anything either when i was in school. i just fell under 80 once - a 79 - but that was it. even then, i got into the semi-honors class in high school and i hardly got any D’s when i was there. i also got into an honors course in college, and i also hardly got any D’s. i was never in any danger of failing and i actually just missed the dean’s list by 0.02 during one semester. when you see my transcript, it’s full of all sorts of C’s and B’s. for some reason, i just had enough in me to pull through… and i got through quite decently. luck. swerte. chamba.

all my life, i’ve never been the friendly type. i even call myself mildly autistic because i seem quite weird sometimes. i like being by myself, talking to myself and just being holed up in my own little world daydreaming. so following that train of thought, i never had many friends, and i was never any good with girls. i was an introvert and i was torpe. actually, my biggest worry about college wasn’t the academics. it was girls. things went fine though. i didn’t exactly have a difficult time, but i wasn’t someone to get noticed either. however, during college came the biggest chamba of my life thus far: i met mau. i remember quite clear the events leading up to "us", but i won’t get into details. the point of the matter is that this introverted torpe somehow met the girl who he felt was the yin to his yang, and the girl felt the same way too! luck. swerte. chamba.

and right now, here’s how it stands… my mom is the head of the HR department in her company, my dad is similarly the head of his department in his company, my sister is a sophomore in ateneo and made the dean’s list this semester, my brother just graduated from ateneo high school and will be an ateneo college freshie next schoolyear. me and mau have been together for 6 years and have been working for almost 4 years. with what we’re making, by the time we have a family of our own, we’ll have enough to make things work quite well. none of us are rich. not even close. we live in a small apartment, but compared to where mama and papa were around 32 years ago, where we all are right now is really a big stretch. luck. swerte. chamba.

when i started typing up this entry a few minutes ago, all i had was an idea i heard this afternoon from some guy. right now, what i have is some sort of a realization. this entry isn’t a testament to being average. i still think i’m average though. i still think i don’t have much going for me compared to the "who’s who" of the world. but when i look back at my life, what i’ve been and what i’ve been through… it starts to become clear that things could have been much much worse. relative to what was and what could have been, life did give me and my family a lot to go on. luck. swerte. chamba.

what is that, really? luck? swerte? chamba? in the words of this afternoon’s speaker, it may seem that way, but it’s not really chamba. nothing happens by accident. all of it is made possible by the grace of God.

but wait… i don’t practice Christianity and i don’t believe in organized religion. so how… uhm… paano na yan?

no biggie. i may not believe in religion, but i still believe in a higher being. i really do. so whether you call it God or Buddha or Allah, it’s all the same to me: "a higher being". and yes, i do believe that nothing happens by accident. everything is provided for (in proportion) for those who work for it and have enough faith.

i really don’t know what my point is with this entry, so if it ends abruptly, then so be it. but just a final thought: you never really know what’s going to happen down the road. you can plan all you want, but life throws more curve-balls your way that you can imagine. all you can count on is that everything happens for a reason. things work themselves out accordingly and the reason reveals itself eventually.

luck. swerte. chamba… …if you want to call it that. ^_^