2008 had been my almost year.

· I almost hit my annual savings target only to spend what I had on a 10-month sabbatical
· I almost made it as a sports photographer
· I almost had my ultimate Boracay experience had it not rained non-stop while I was there
· I almost experienced THE concert of the decade – the Eheads reunion
· I almost learned how to process my own films
· I almost filled up the forms that would get me an ACFJ fellowship
· I almost filled up the forms that would get me into the Angkor Photo Festival
· I almost took MA classes in Sociology at UP – gut feel made me hold my horses while I was queuing up to pay for tuition
· I almost saw Malboro Hills, went biking through Batan roads and danced under the Sabtang stars in Batanes with good friends, beer in hand and a bonfire to keep me warm
· I almost loved in the real (not just emotional) sense of the word

Choices. What makes a decision? Sometimes I feel that my life would have been a lot different had I not been too rash or too cautious at particular times. When do you know that what you had done was indeed, the right thing to have done? Should I just have flipped a coin?

This year, I have discovered for myself the lessons that I had so been ambivalent about just because they were cliches. I learned firsthand that patience is a virtue, that haste makes waste, that change cannot happen overnight. For the longest time, I have been teaching myself not to want lest I set myself up for disappointment. I never ventured into anything that I felt I was not capable to achieve. Some say I am realistic and that’s good. Others tell me I’m just chicken. This year I learned to want and want badly. But fate’s immediate, painful albeit predictable retort was the reality that one cannot always get what one wants, at least not in an instant. I guess it is only after after we learn how to want and wait that patience is learned.

Waiting can mean different things to different people. For most, it elicits a negative restless feeling because waiting renders one’s faculties and abilities inutile. No matter how important a person you are, even if you graduated top of your class in astrophysics, for example, you can do nothing while waiting for a delayed flight to your in-laws place due to bad weather. Waiting also is painful in that it simply shows how we humans are not prescient. A mother does not know how her only child will turn out to be. Will he be able to maximize his talents and potentials and live a full contented life, or will he be a good-for-nothing convict who just wants to “snuff it out”?

The only antidote to the pain of waiting is hope. It is not blind hope nor optimistic blithe because hope that is most real is only borne out of situations where one realizes that he is utterly human – very limited and impotent. It is, instead, a hope that flickers like a candle light amidst a blanket of darkness. Sometimes it is in danger of blowing out, sometimes it is steadfast and still.

The challenge therefore, is for us to cultivate hope and take care of it like a lifesource, to put paper shields around it in the form of a trusted friend, a mentor, good literature and our own silent meditations. In a word, we are called to hope not indolently but proactively. And, to add another cliché, we are challenged to try and try until we reach our goals. After all, although loneliness can be that feeling of almost but not really, loneliness is really love unexpressed, it is love unshared. And loving, in the real sense of the word, is not just feeling for but doing for. Loneliness, therefore, is not achieving nothing but doing nothing.

A further challenge is to know that when we’ve done our part and else fails, we can modify our aspirations to something not necessarily easier because it is reachable, but just different because it is more natural, uncontrived and something that brings peace to all concerned. After wanting, being patient, cultivating hope, the final and most humbling thing that may be asked from us is acceptance and letting go. This is, I think, the most concrete manifestation of trusting that in the end, all shall be well and all shall be well.

I don’t know if all my choices in 2008 had been right. I think that I may have messed up one thing or another and would have been better off doing otherwise. But I am here now. And I am happy to know that although the year will be ending, another year is beginning and I pray that I be armed with the openness to want (even want the same things I wanted before), the reminder to be patient, the preliminary practice of waiting, the tenacity of proactive hoping and the humility of letting go.