Life Goes On
Somber Thursday. It is six in the evening and I’m sitting in my office pondering on the idiosyncrasies in life. I’m wedged in my philosophical world once again, trying to figure out why life turns out the way it does sometimes – like the guessing game it really is. You can only so much as guess what’s going to happen in the future, but at the end of the day, it is Fate that does the talking and calls the shots. Despite doing all that you could do to make life as predictable as possible, at least so that you could prevent disasters from occurring, there’s no way you could ever prepare enough. No way that you could cheat fate somehow and emerge victorious all the time regardless of all the effort that you put in, for it is a multi-faceted world and the human brain could only see things from so few a perspective.
I wasn’t one who believed in predestination when I was still young enough to be naïve about life. I always thought that as long as you took control of the circumstances in your life, you would reap what you sow. Easy as that. You build a well, you get nice clean water. You plant a garden full of vegetables, and you have food. And so forth. Very cavemen thinking, but you get my drift.
Then, slowly but surely, the years piled experience on me, some bitter, some sweet, some of which I have seen through the eyes of the people around me. It brought forth certain acquiescence somehow that there are many, many things that are really totally beyond your control. Then, in analogy of my earlier thoughts, building a well to get water or planting a garden full of vegetables to get food cease to be so direct and simple. The equation just gets more and more complicated if you focused long enough on it. Because life simply is complicated.
Why am I being so philosophical when it is time to go home and shake away the stress of my daily routine and rejuvenate? Sigh. It is indeed a gloomy, gloomy day. There’s this hypnotic patter of rain on the tin roof that adds to the depressing mood. It hasn’t stopped raining since a couple of hours back. On top of that, there’s a thought that has been sitting on my shoulders all day long. It’s becoming quite a burden that follows me around, so I guess as always, my method of lessening the burden would to vent the only way I know how.
I’ve been put in a very weird position today, to put it simply. Today, I played the role of the bearer of grim news. In my line of work, I guess it’s inevitable at times to handle delicate situations that arise every now and then. This time, it was handing a legal letter to one of the debtors of my company. I was to negotiate and draw up a schedule for him to pay up what he owed us, one that is favorable for both parties of course. And it would have been an easy task but for the circumstances involved.
The man was old, with not a single strand of white hair left on his head. When I walked in the room, I could feel somehow the obscurity that seemed to hang in the air. Okay, a bit melodramatic maybe, but I had expected the tough, sarcastic man I had always dealt with. However, the sarcasm and bravado was missing this morning. Behind the desk, he sat hunched as he waited for me to enter…a hunch I interpreted as dispiritedness.
I suppose I came to that conclusion based on what I heard about the man. He had just lost his wife to cancer. After years of battling the disease and spending a hefty amount on her medical bills, she passed away some time around Chinese New Year this year and left him destitute. It was easy to draw conclusion that he had held her close to his heart from the grapevines of our industry, and I was certain that that much was true as I sat there and heard his side of the story. He mentioned her more than a handful of times during our conversation and turned misty each time he did. Such raw emotions in his eyes shook me a little, as well as my resolve to appear professional in every sense. There I had a grown man, probably older than my father, who was laying his heart on the line, and asking me to understand somehow the circumstances that he was in.
Aside from talking about his deceased wife, he did explain too why his business was suffering. Everything was going wrong simultaneously, he told me. Despite all that he did to prevent his business from going down the drain, despite following every single rule written on the book, shit just…happened. It was fate.
There. That word that sums it all. It was fate, he said. While things were going wrong at home, fate has chosen to pile on him problems at the work front…mysteriously, too. While the industry had been steadily growing, he had been losing customers who had been loyal to him for the past twenty years. It was as if fate was playing a cruel trick on him that out of all the players in the industry, it had to be his customers that suffered big setbacks at the same time too. It wasn’t what he had hoped for or planned, he stressed. And now that he was in this situation, it wasn’t anymore a question of wanting to pay us. It was a question of whether he could afford to pay us. Already he had sold off his land and in order to save on resources, he had gone back to riding a motorcycle. When his wife passed away, he had lost all hope to move on, he added. But somehow, someway, he saw light again, and managed to gather enough faith to finally move on and revive his business that he had single handedly built through the years. Please understand, please understand, he asked of me. If I had handed him the legal letter and if our company stuck by it, it would be the end of him.
I understood perfectly well…and some part of me felt very, very sorry for what he had gone through. Still, business is business and money is money. For some time, my sense of conscience struggled with getting the job done. I suppose many would tell me that these were the sob stories that I should prepare myself to hear when collecting a debt. I can’t tell what it was about him that tugged on my heartstrings, though. Was it his devotion to his wife? Was it the way he was seemingly stripped of the arrogance and pride I always saw in him to arrive to this hunched, gray old man sitting behind the desk, looking at me with old, weary eyes? Was it the way he fidgeted on the jade-gold wedding ring he had on his finger as he spoke? Hell, in a very strange way, the ring reminded me of my own father (he wears an almost identical one), and the fact that this old man has come from the same era as Daddy had. Okay, I’m screwing up the connection a little here…but somehow, during that period of time, all I could think of was…it could happen to anyone, my beloved Daddy included.
Sigh. See why sometimes I think I’m too fainthearted for the job? It’s my melodramatic nature. In the end, I could only wish him well, and reiterate that please forgive me, I’m just doing my job. Hold on to the letter first, I said, and try your best to work things out. On my side, I will try to talk to my directors regarding it and see what we could come out with.
As I drove back to the office, I could feel this frown that was practically bunching up my forehead. To this moment, I could still feel the weight of his words. And human to human, I sympathize and wish that somehow there was something I could do to make things better. Too much suffering in the world. Too much. Sigh.
Still, it isn’t all grim. Who was it who liked to highlight that despite all the sham and drudgery in the world it is still a beautiful place? I guess it was me. Maybe if anything, it just proves that the human spirit is indomitable somehow. The man had risen above his grief and failures, with enough hope to help him move on. I suppose that means something.
Outside the rain had ceased. When I walk out of this place and drive back home, I’m sure I would see the beauty of the raindrops that glimmer on the flowers and leaves in the garden outside my home under the pale moonlight. And the air would be cool and fresh, with a whiff of the rain. Beauty, beauty everywhere, even in darkness, after every storm.
I only hope that all those grieving hearts out there would hold on to the conviction that despite being tried and tested by fate, life, in all its splendor and eccentricity, inevitably goes on.
