To the Greener Grass

The calender page turns to July and we’ve gone passed the half of the year. As we strive to reach our goals this year, it’s time to be grateful for how far we’ve come once again. And this time, I’m sharing not my own account but Daddy’s because we’re just proud of him.

Over the past month, Daddy has been practicing to walk in the streets slowly with the cane and the physical therapist. Street vendors, tricycle drivers, our house guards and passersby—their eyes all fixated on his legs. Since he was a perennial “person of the outside” before the accident, many of them thought that he just moved out to another country or elsewhere because they did not get to see him for a long while. They were surprised about what happened and felt concerned.

One of his major exercise challenges is to go down from seventh floor to the lower ground floor and back again by stairs. In a couple or more instances, old Chinese neighbors in different floors scolded him for they thought he was punishing himself with struggling efforts to climb up and down. “Why not use the elevator instead?”Others claimed that he won’t be recuperating anyway, so he’s only giving himself more pain and trouble.

These are the times when he defends that he needs these physical exercises to become better. I think that God may have also used these vessels not to encourage him to pull over and stop but to encourage him to still keep try and go on. I think that by verbally explicating his reasons (to both internal and external little whispering devils) on why he needs to train, his belief in the purpose and in himself amplifies. I’m glad he accepted the inkling that this may be his second life. He has been granted another chance to live however with this tussle, and I’m also glad that he’s thankful for it.

To date, there are still times when he gets caught up in the “why me” and “no fair” of life. So when he asked me two nights ago, for the nth time, of why he was chosen to experience this cruelty, my answer was that maybe it’s for him to inspire more people. True, he had received too much credit for his experiences before as a made-up person, a charismatic and hardworking businessman, a fulfilled family man, a devoted follower of God who shares the good word to a lot of people with his own means.

When life gets to be this stable and satisfactory, most days are as forgettable as the next: things don’t change, people follow the same patterns and do the same things. It’s a rare day that goes to shape a person, the simply great moments and the truly horrible ones, that will last forever burnt into someone’s mind. It’s in these moments that we find who we truly are and set ourselves on a course to be who we want to be. I am convinced that:

God has set him to another divergence of road-learning to be a walking example. To walk the talk, he has to uplift himself and choose not to be contrite for the heartbreaking and horrific things that happened but be conscious that there’s a powerful message that’s waiting to be delivered and shared.

Events do not happen to us but for us as we happen to them. From these, we learn how to suffer and overcome suffering. We can allow things to tear us down or choose for them to build us up. There is this thin line between what happens to us and what happens for us. While one creates victims, the other creates survivors. I’d place emphasis on “kick-ass survivors,” those who are ablaze with wisdom, strength, confidence and the desire to transform the bad into good, hatred into love, loathing into acceptance. These people are those who have the power to use their experiences to embolden them and make a difference to the world. These people are those who believe that we are not the result of what or will happen in our life but are the result of what we choose to do next thus they move forward.

I take this moment to thank the World in advance, for I know that not many months from now, we would wonder where Daddy’s wheelchair and cane — went. ɞ

About Rochkirstin Santos-Sioco

Health and technology freak. Food and lifestyle blogger with a large appetite for food and travel.