BETTER THAN IT GETS -- SOMETIMES

(Speech delivered at the launching of IN ANOTHER DRESS, the e-book, by Vee Press and Vibal Foundation, at the Manila International Book Fair at SMX Center, Mall of Asia, on September 17. Likewise launched were e-books by Noemi Lardizabal Dado and Lady S.)

I started my blog four years ago and named it Ode to Old – a thinly veiled attempt to put romance and poetry into aging. I thought if I could convince my readers it’s alright to grow old, then perhaps I could feel good about it, too.

I was at the edge of retirement then, anxious over the prospect of living half a life. You know … waking up with no more "gosh-I’m-gonna-be-late" get up and go. Dressing up with no destination. Walking without direction. Taking coffee and lunch breaks – uninterrupted.

I decided to blog, hoping it would engage and absorb me well into antiquity.

I sub-titled my blog “the best is yet to be.” I did it tongue in cheek, wistfully, wishfully, almost with a sense of desperation.

As I blogged on, I was surprised the jitters began to ease.

Blogging gave me a voice to talk to the world. But one has to talk of things the world would care to listen to.

I guess that is how a blogger learns to look at things with a fresh eye, to look for the instructive, the comic, the unusual in the most commonplace experiences. Or else, WHO would read what a blogger writes?

The requisite introspection in blogging put me in touch with inner wisdom that told me if I didn’t worry, I would arrive exactly where I am now and MORE pleasantly.

I vented left-over toxins every now and then. And I wondered if it was true that once you put down your troubles on paper, they stay put there.

Two and half years into retirement, AM I HAVING THE TIME of my life?

Well … even though most of the jitters have fled, there are days in fact that I do magnificently, days I cope miserably, and days I just seem to get by.

Which, come to think of it, is almost the exact same way my younger days, my pre-retirement days, used to zig and zing and zag.

So, then as now, there are days I couldn’t seem to do anything right, and days everything falls into place, and days ….. I just don’t know.

But I DID know, ten months ago, when my blogs were compiled into a thin volume entitled “IN ANOTHER DRESS” then published and launched, I could almost glimpse the “BEST that was yet to be.”

And I DO KNOW THAT TODAY is another day for hoping that indeed age is an opportunity, much like youth, though dressed differently.

Thank you, Vibal Foundation and Vee Press for reincarnating the book in the digital sphere, for making possible this opportune, exciting, high- tech version of IN ANOTHER DRESS, making virtually the whole world its prospective reader.

Photo credits: Noemi Lardizabal Dado, Alina R. Co