Alarming

(This piece was posted on September 8, 2007 in my friendster account) 

Education in our country is getting worse. I just can’t understand why a first year college student cannot differentiate a sentence from a paragraph. Last Friday, I had a midterm exam with my students. I gave them only four questions for an essay type of exam. Since it was an essay exam, I reminded them not to give me answers in bullets- like what some of them did in the past- but paragraphs. The instruction was to write extensively, yet precisely about some given topics. Imagine, one student in one of his answers only wrote one sentence. Now where was being extensive? Maybe it was precise, but it was supposed to be an essay - a paragraph or two. An essay with only a sentence in it? Huh, what can we do? Just wondering and our leaders are doing nothing…

Moving On But Overburnened?

(This article was posted on October 5, 2007 in my friendster account)

My feeling now is that I am so overburdened with various things that the solution I can think of is to drop at least one of them for the time being. The old wisdom is still true: one step at a time. Huh! I am just too proud to pretend that I can do many things together. Now I am back to my senses. Glad I have realized this before I get burned out.

I plan to just put a stop to my Ph.D. courses at the University of San Carlos in Cebu after a semester of hard labor. The University can always wait, hehehe. Maybe I’ll be back next year. My present concern rests on the movement I started. I have started it, therefore it is imperative for me to finish it, at least to advance a little. I need not mention here the two offices I simultaneously hold. Indeed, I am a busy guy. Or, acting like a busy-body, hahahaha! Nevertheless, my life now is so exciting and challenging. It is never idle. It’s good for as the saying goes “the devil finds work for idle hands.”

It is good really to do things one at a time. I am afraid,like what happened to some people I know, that when I reach 40 or maybe mid-life, I am already at my peak and there is no more for me to go. The danger at the peak and since there is nowhere else to go, is that I start looking for another path; maybe it is a going back to zero. I start all over again. And maybe by that time it is a different road; maybe the one not less taken. It will be exciting then but I don’t know if the energy is still there.

Hahay, life! It is not a circle. I believe it is linear. There is no more turning back. No U-turn! It is even a one-way traffic. We just move on in one direction. Maybe some are slow; at their own pace. But it is not a question of who is faster or slower. It is the moving forward that matters most. The faster we move, the earlier we stumble. Slowly but surely! The turtle can always reach the finish line.

But what about running? Can we run? Of course! But only those with less baggages can run. Hence we need to unload those unnecessary baggages. We can even unload everything. Or we just bring the essential: the very basic things. But not just things but friends and loved ones. With them we run together.

How about priorities? Yah, first things first. Only then I can move on…      

The pursuit of being

The pursuit of being, I should say, is the project of Western philosophy.  And this pursuit, however, has gone through a long history of transformations and transmutations.  What do we mean here?  In the history of thought, being has been labelled in many different ways.  In Plato and in Aristotle, being became eidos or energia.  During the Middle Ages, being was termed God.  In the Modern times, especially in Descartes, it became the Cogito.  And finally in Hegel, being was known as the Geist.  All these are transmutations of being.  For Martin Heidegger, in pursuing being, one must go to the original, to the primordial.  What is essential must be uncovered in its originality.  It must be disclosed.  All the transmutations above must be bracketed for us to uncover the primordial being - aletheia.  In doing this we go back to the first thinkers who firstly formulated the question of being.  The being discovered by them was free or devoid of concepts.  We go back to the experience of awe and wonder upon discovering what being is.  This is the whole project of Heidegger - to go back to that pursuit of being which is the widest, the deepest, and the most fundamental. - Jose Conrado A. Estafia     

Thank You!

On behalf of the Send a Soul to School Movement, I would like to thank the people of Jagna for attending Gail’s Concert. Your presence really made a big difference in the lives of our poor scholars.  My deepest gratitude also would go to the sponsors who unselfishly contributed a lot to the success of the said event. Hangtud sa sunod! God bless and rest assured of my constant prayers…

-Fr. Dongdong