Fated to choose

THIS WEEK’S WINNER

MANILA, Philippines - Faye Gonzalez graduated cum laude last March from Ateneo de Manila University with a degree in Communications and a minor in Sociology. She is currently a Jesuit volunteer assigned in the Diocese of Borongan in Eastern Samar. “I love films, nature, books, and chocolate. I want to be a filmmaker, a photographer, a lawyer, and sometimes a marine biologist. Still, I don’t know what to do after my volunteer year.”

In the modest number of years that I have lived, not once have I been troubled by a lack of freedom. I was, in fact, too boldly free for my own good so that shortly after graduating from college, I violated my parents’ wishes and chose to be a Jesuit volunteer. Fresh from middle-class Manila and brimming with idealism, I stuffed some 20 shirts into my behemoth of a suitcase and flew to Eastern Samar last June.

Friends ask about my plans after this and I am quick to say, “I don’t know.” The possibilities are many and it is taxing to go through them. More taxing is to be weighed down by the question on the meaning of my work. Was I sent here for a reason? Some days I have the answers to console myself. But some days I imagine Tomas rearing his head from under a blanket to say: “Es konnte auch anders sein (It could just as well be otherwise).”

In The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera illustrates the human condition: people stumbling from one pole of human existence to another only to discover how closely these ends touch. Thus the womanizing Tomas inexplicably falls in love with the vulnerable Tereza. The artist Sabina, disgusted with collective sentiments, finds herself enamored of Franz who perpetually dreams of becoming part of a revolution. Compassion is defined capriciously as pity, but also as the supreme ability to feel the whole gamut of emotions another person feels. When Yakov, son of the powerful Stalin, electrified himself because he could not justify habitually streaking the soldiers’ latrine with his shit, Kundera notes, “No one felt more concretely than Yakov how interchangeable opposites are, how short the step from one pole of human existence to the other.”

In darkness we grope for answers, in light we are overwhelmed by many. In poverty we complain of hunger, in prosperity we lament that there should be more to life. We have witnessed how history overthrew kings and proclaimed rebels as heroes. And have you realized that the hands we use to receive the body of Christ are the same ones we use to wipe our asses? It is this world where something can be simultaneously scorned and exalted that accounts for the coming together of Kundera’s colorful characters in a deceptively simple merger between choice and chance.

Tomas, a surgeon, was never the hopeless romantic. Outside the operating room, his hands skillfully and dutifully pried into each female body he encountered in bed. He believed that the only dissimilarity worth discovering in womankind is the one not easily exposed. No one could be more surprised than him when he was gripped by an emotion he couldn’t identify—“Was it love or hysteria?”

Tomas would continue to stroll the distance between love and sex. Yet in love there is desire for physical union. Intimate acts can in turn water the soil of love. A drunken escapade can excusably be a pretext for starting a family.

Kundera remarks that we are drunk on the idea that our love can never be ordinary. “We all reject out of hand the idea that the love of our life may be something light or weightless; we presume our love is what must be, that without it our life would no longer be the same.” In a song, one pleads, “Tell me how two people find each other in a world that’s full of strangers.” I’ll tell you how: people just really tend to marry within the same social class, interest spheres, and geographical zones.    

In all this, where does love really begin? Should I fall sad at the realization that I and my future lover’s names are not written in the stars? Maybe to accept that love can be ordinary is to believe in a relationship’s capacity to transcend its mundane beginnings, and that to have faith in a relationship is to be able to bank on your maturity to keep things together rather than blame bad luck for your every argument.

“We can never know what to want, because, living only one life, we can neither compare it with our previous lives nor perfect it in our lives to come,” Kundera writes.

We have only one life and that is a burden. What fatigue would we suffer if we had a dozen lives to spare? We can have an itinerary for each and not spend a minute panicking over how our souls might be saved. The first one we can spend in guiltless indulgence and the last in begging for absolution. But in this tragedy of having only one life, there is grace in the power to choose. In choosing, I still the waves of uncertainty. In choosing, I create my own certainty. Perhaps our heaviest yoke — the unbearable lightness of our being — is that in love and in life, we are fated to choose.

Known for his dalliances but crushed by his strong feelings for Tereza, Tomas does the unexpected and marries her. She cannot stand the smell of another woman in his groin yet she stays with him. Tomas “came to the conclusion that the love story of his life exemplified not ‘Es muss sein!’ (It must be so), but rather ‘Es konnte auch anders sein’ (It could just as well be otherwise).” I can only surmise what they both held onto, but they showed me how hope can be grounded in a certainty that may be absurd but which I myself have created. I volunteered not because I was sure I would survive a year away from everything that is comfortably familiar; I knew I would survive because I signed a piece of paper signifying my year-long commitment to it. My having chosen it prepared me for the worst. That’s why after amoebiasis and typhoid fever, insurmountable frustrations, and the heavy experience of disillusionment, I am still here. I volunteered not because I was sure my efforts would amount to something; I was only sure of my fragile but unrelenting hope that they would.

On Dec. 6, my friend Bro. Kim will be ordained to priesthood, and it’s not because he’s absolutely sure that no woman could ever lure him out of his priestly vestments. For all we know, he may one day meet the girl of his dreams and find himself in shady situations where the only certainty is his vow of loyalty to God, which should then be enough to decide everything.