New Horizons

It's funny how your whole life and everything you know can change in the blink of an eye. When my wife and I woke up on the morning of September 26, 2009, we were making plans for going out in the afternoon despite the rain. It was, for all intents and purposes, just like any normal day for us (though a wet one at that) and we were all going through our normal routine. It was the height of Typhoon Ondoy (international name Ketsana) and we had no inkling at all that we were going to spend the evening huddled on top of the roof of our neighbor's house with most of our belongings going under water.

We used to live in Provident Village in Marikina, one of the hardest hit places in Metro Manila during Typhoon Ondoy. At its highest level, the water reached up to the waist at the 2nd floor, though we were relatively lucky considering we were in the higher parts of the village. Some houses were totally submerged. By the grace of God, all of us in the house survived: me, my wife, my elder sister, my aging parents, my aunt and our house help, including our dogs and cat, though all my mom's lovebirds and my sister's fishes didn't make it.

After the waters receded the next day, some of our relatives came to take us out of the disaster area. It was like a scene out of the TV series "Jericho" with lines of refugees streaming out on the streets, a logjam of cars and debris with soldiers and disaster response teams all over the place. I used to only watch this on the news. It's certainly a different feeling when you ARE the news.

For a few days we holed up at the house of one of my cousins before moving to the house of one of my uncles while we decided what to do. We finally found a house to rent while we picked up the pieces of our life left in the aftermath of the typhoon and cleaned up what remained of our former life. One thing was for sure, we weren't moving back to the old house.

Everything seemed surreal, as we maintained a hectic pace cleaning up and then looking for a new house, and then followed by the preparations for moving in to the new house. Most of everything we owned, everything we knew and were used to doing was thrown into total disarray. It was certainly an emphatic lesson on letting go of attachments. Looking back, as we were in danger of drowning the thought of having accumulated all sorts of things over the decades and having stored them in the house looked ridiculous, since we all had to abandon them in a heartbeat.

Another lesson I learned is that without us neighbors helping each other, we wouldn't have all made it out alive. It's striking that people you barely said "Hi" to would be the very people you'd be relying on to save your life, or vice versa. Sometimes it takes a disaster to bring out the sense of oneness in everyone.

Finally, last March 20 we moved to our new house in the Alabang area. It's technically my brother's house, since he was the one who funded the purchase and decided where we were going to move to. But at least it's a place where we can stay for the longer term. Things started to settle down and I even got the urge to restart this blog.

When I was in college, I always wondered how it would feel to live in the Alabang area, in one of the area's exclusive subdivisions, because I had classmates from this area. After Ondoy though, I viewed the move with some trepidation because the Alabang area was not as high as I preferred (unlike the house we were renting, which was in the Lagro area, a few hundred feet above sea level). But the move happened anyway, and as usual there is a reason for everything. At least I was able to fulfill my curiosity about living here.

In one sense it feels like we got transported to a different world. Different ways of doing things, different treatment. It's here that I found out just how much of a double started there is in the Philippines. For example, if you go to your typical bank, there are usually long lines yet not all the teller booths are occupied. Here in the immediate area, not only are there no lines, all the teller booths are occupied. It's obvious that the clientele of the area do not like waiting.

Of course, this cuts both ways. Just from Alabang Town Center, once the taxis find out your destination is one of the exclusive subdivisions here, they automatically have a fixed rate of at least P200, when it would only cost you about a third of that amount if they used the taxi meter.

There are certainly a lot of adjustments, and the lesson is still about letting go of attachments, since the distance and change of living expenses has forced me to re-think my usual activities again. And of course, in this idyllic setting of quiet streets and refreshing breezes, there is the danger of becoming complacent about the true state of the world right now (there's news of a major earthquake at the rate of about twice a week now). So it's something that I need to be constantly cognizant of.

In any case, I'm quite happy and grateful that this has turned out the way it has. Just by being in this area, we are constantly bathed in prosperity energy and I found out that generally, the house has good feng shui. It's not perfect, but whatever bad feng shui there is was easily remedied by the corrective measures I learned in the Pranic Feng Shui seminarI recently attended.

As the title of this post implies, some new horizons have opened up for me, and it's turning out to be one heck of a ride.