The present is a gift

My grandparents raised me in a small town at the foot of Mount Apo. The mornings were filled with beautiful hymns from Don Moen played on the piano by my Lola and the fragrant scent of garlic fried rice cooked by my Lolo. These events were part of the routine that I lived through for the first eight or nine years of my life. I am now 23, yet when I look back on these memories, I imagine them as if they had just happened yesterday.

I imagine I am the same little girl living in a small town at the foot of Mount Apo. I close my eyes and picture the dilapidated buildings as if they were just built—a fresh coat of paint, a crowd bustling outside to watch as the doors fly open; I scour my thoughts for all the faces that look too familiar and try to rid myself of them—a clean slate, a moment to meet them all again for the first time, fewer wrinkles, less white hair on the tops of their heads. I breathe in the Manila air and pretend it is the same scent that meets my nose each morning I wake up in that town. I think about a barren land yet to be filled with the hundreds of mangosteen and rambutan trees that my Lolo would plant in our backyard. I remember my Lola carrying books still tightly wrapped in plastic and ribbons and my name written on a small card dangling from the side.

Recently, I have been watching a show called “The Kominsky Method” about the life of an old acting coach who teaches a younger generation how to make it in the world of acting; it also delves into how he handles the inevitabilities of life, most especially death, as more often than not, he ends up holding the hands of friends and lovers that go before him. In one of the episodes, Sandy, the lead, talks to his class about how to approach death as an actor; he says the dramatic soliloquy at the end of life is pure and utter nonsense. If anything is being said, it’s internal. You can almost hear it—they’re having an internal conversation filled with disbelief and wonder that their life has come to an end. For the dying, the living is irrelevant. So, if you ever have the opportunity to play such a scene, approach it with reverence, and consider it holy. Make sure it receives your utmost care and respect.

When I think about these words, I think about how all my memories have experienced a certain kind of death. I say this because memories are merely thoughts and speculations that you have about what happened at specific points in your life—they will have been seen and heard by others, but the memories that you keep are the only things left of what you have and what you have heard. From this perspective, I say that we experience death little by little. This is not to say that it diminishes the value of death, but rather it highlights how death is a part of the life that we have been given. At times, it is swift and silent; other times, it is loud and slow, but always, it is both internal and external.

You reach a time in your life when you may tend to forget about things like this. You are focused on your career, the bright future ahead of you, the people you are about to meet, and the life you are about to make for yourself. You forget, not for the reason that it is unimportant, but rather because it is not the present that you are faced with. It is a mere possibility, a thought that passes your mind once every other month.

Reflecting on all this means returning to the saying: To appreciate the sun, you must know the rain. The present is a gift that is bestowed upon us daily—we breathe it, but to live it would be to understand how temporary it is and how limited the number of presents we may or may not receive in this lifetime; to appreciate life is to know the permanence of death.

Now, I find myself counting each yesterday, today, and tomorrow that I have, not in fear that someday I will run out, but in appreciation that, indeed, someday, I will run out. I am at a point in my life where most people are achieving the peaks of their careers, and most of my friends have begun their journey in postgraduate school, and here I am, relishing my time of reflection and being. I understand that tomorrow will come and that my time for achievements will also come, but as I wait for my turn, I deem it more than crucial to treat each yesterday, today, and tomorrow with the utmost care and respect—the way the people before me have done so, the way I remember how to do it in my memories. I venture beyond the realm of imagination, and with that, I pour myself a cup of coffee, breathe in the Manila air, and rest in the arms of today and what I may do with it.

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Julyan Ira B. Kabigting, 23, is a nurse, writer, and future medical student. When she’s not busy with the hustle and bustle of the world, you can find this young soul at the heart of Cubao, musing and laughing with her friends.