Scarred People Are Beautiful
(I read a blog entry of an old high school friend and I had to write this "response")
How I wish God, at the time of our birth, has provided us with a manual on how to go about life. This God-given gift called life is a complicated gadget. It is unpredictable, most often goes beyond human control. It is almost impossible. It can be unfair. It never goes your way. It is trained to give joy as well as hurt people. Wise men say it is all a test. If it is, then it is a test made for no one to pass. The questions were made so as not to have answers. Even if they are easy, the hard part is finding the solutions. But perhaps more complicated than life is love.
How I wish God, at the time of our birth, has provided us the genes to love. This God-given virtue is never intended for men to use. Only those that can claim divinity can love. Not humans. We sing about it. We make movies about it. We read it on paperbacks. We write it on scented papers. But in truth, we hardly have a clue about it. We don't know how to make use of it. We sometimes overdo it. We sometimes don't have it at all. Imagine therefore a life "doomed" to love. It becomes a puzzle within a complicated labyrinth. It is more than just an unanswerable mytery.
How would life have been if we all knew how to live and how to love?
But the truth is, we will never have any idea on how to truly live and truly love. In the absence of a manual or a tutorial, we make use with our lives through experimentation. Every day is a new day for discovery. Yesterday we could have had discovered friendship, the fruits of relationship and mutual attraction. Tomorrow, we might discover the opposite of all of these. By the end of the week, we could have had discovered new set of ways to find happiness, to end up in sorrow, to feel betrayed, to flourish in attention.
Every day we make mistakes. And we pull ourselves up and try again. Once in a while we fall in love and then we find ourselves falling into nowhere. If life would have been pre-arranged for our comfort, then we will never grow. For growth requires the building up and tearing down of things. We build upon happy thoughts and memorable experiences. We build upon loving people and loyal friends. And we tear down the undesirable and the moments of despair.
We learn the value of trust only if we are made to experience betrayal. We learn the value of success only if we are made to experience failure. We learn the value of abundance only if we are made to want. We learn the value of love only if we are made to be hated.
However we make of our life and however we make mistakes in loving, we end up, almost always, happy and most of all, beautiful. For the scars we bear are not to be hidden as if they were grotesque in nature. Rather, they are testaments to how much we have made use of our lives and how much we have loved. God has only limited us on how long to live, but he never limited us on how much to live. God has never told us on how to be loved but he has rather shown us how to love.
In the ups and downs of life, I feel that it is more than just a cycle of things. Life is never a cycle. I see it more as an unending rollercoaster. We ride the unpretentious wave of life's events and we can do nothing but raise our hands, scream and laugh.
I thank God for not giving us a manual on how to live life. He has given us a gift which, depending on how to use it, can conform according to our own heart's desires.
How I wish God, at the time of our birth, has provided us with a manual on how to go about life. This God-given gift called life is a complicated gadget. It is unpredictable, most often goes beyond human control. It is almost impossible. It can be unfair. It never goes your way. It is trained to give joy as well as hurt people. Wise men say it is all a test. If it is, then it is a test made for no one to pass. The questions were made so as not to have answers. Even if they are easy, the hard part is finding the solutions. But perhaps more complicated than life is love.
How I wish God, at the time of our birth, has provided us the genes to love. This God-given virtue is never intended for men to use. Only those that can claim divinity can love. Not humans. We sing about it. We make movies about it. We read it on paperbacks. We write it on scented papers. But in truth, we hardly have a clue about it. We don't know how to make use of it. We sometimes overdo it. We sometimes don't have it at all. Imagine therefore a life "doomed" to love. It becomes a puzzle within a complicated labyrinth. It is more than just an unanswerable mytery.
How would life have been if we all knew how to live and how to love?
But the truth is, we will never have any idea on how to truly live and truly love. In the absence of a manual or a tutorial, we make use with our lives through experimentation. Every day is a new day for discovery. Yesterday we could have had discovered friendship, the fruits of relationship and mutual attraction. Tomorrow, we might discover the opposite of all of these. By the end of the week, we could have had discovered new set of ways to find happiness, to end up in sorrow, to feel betrayed, to flourish in attention.
Every day we make mistakes. And we pull ourselves up and try again. Once in a while we fall in love and then we find ourselves falling into nowhere. If life would have been pre-arranged for our comfort, then we will never grow. For growth requires the building up and tearing down of things. We build upon happy thoughts and memorable experiences. We build upon loving people and loyal friends. And we tear down the undesirable and the moments of despair.
We learn the value of trust only if we are made to experience betrayal. We learn the value of success only if we are made to experience failure. We learn the value of abundance only if we are made to want. We learn the value of love only if we are made to be hated.
However we make of our life and however we make mistakes in loving, we end up, almost always, happy and most of all, beautiful. For the scars we bear are not to be hidden as if they were grotesque in nature. Rather, they are testaments to how much we have made use of our lives and how much we have loved. God has only limited us on how long to live, but he never limited us on how much to live. God has never told us on how to be loved but he has rather shown us how to love.
In the ups and downs of life, I feel that it is more than just a cycle of things. Life is never a cycle. I see it more as an unending rollercoaster. We ride the unpretentious wave of life's events and we can do nothing but raise our hands, scream and laugh.
I thank God for not giving us a manual on how to live life. He has given us a gift which, depending on how to use it, can conform according to our own heart's desires.
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