I don't exactly recall when I last wrote a blog or when I last wrote my opinion column Spark of Law in a newspaper here. Maybe I wrote them two years ago or more, but the feeling seems to me that I wrote eons hence.
I notice that I lost track of my friends here at multiply. I have not commented to any blog nor did I see anyone saying "hi" to my guest page, except for one soul, a medicine woman. But hers was "hi" a long time ago.
What happened during those lost times? Or should ceasing to write, a lost moment? Is it not a lost moment also when one pounds the keyboard for hours and days and weeks and years, doing nothing but write? Is it not acting out ones thoughts and ideas more akin to living than just merely writing about them? where should the boundaries of writing and of doing lie in relation to living?
And should I ask? what happened to me for almost two years when I ceased writing? Did I loss a period of my life?
Let me recall and count the ways how I tried to live without writing, and you be the judge if what I did was all about living.
Two years ago, I ventured and created a manpower agency. It deploys workers to companies. The contractual labor force in the company has now reached 600 employees and the organic staff in my company now has reached 23 from two employees. Great stuff there?
There you are. I must have spent a lot of time cajoling, recruiting, terminating, scolding, inspiring people, actions which I must have all done at a given day. Expand these actions to weeks, then months, and then years. There lies the reason why I did not write. My hands were full. Alibis, me too have many.
Would these range of actions then constitute living?
Let me go further. The work has taken my tennis time, and sapped my desires to hit the forehands and backhands. Instead of playing tennis, I was there, at the table, gambling with cards, a game we call "tongits" which has a naturally "high" more orgasmic than the dragging, albeit, popular poker.
What else have I been doing? Well, I bathe my shepherd, all by myself, at least, once a month although it should have been weekly. Bogart, I mean the German Shepherd, is almost three years old now. Despite his stately stature, and loud barks when strangers disturb his peace, he is still meek as a lamb when I command him to sit and stay still.
Jingle is there too, a cross of Japanese Spitz and Siberian Huskies. At times, I bathe and comb his silken mane. He is one year this month. He keeps me busy in the house too as he always want to catch your attention.
Of course, a proud father cannot miss mentioning how he trained and coached her daughter who now ranks number five in the national standing, and the ten year old son who now ranks 6th in his category. Training them is no mean feat. The searing day would not stop us. The blisters and the fatigue, the trying-hard coach of a dad did not mind.
Community service is always there. Saturdays and Sundays were spent at the sports center, training ten to fifteen kids, whose parents are more enthusiastic than the kids are to learn tennis. After six months of weekend grinds, these kids have learned to love tennis, and shown their potentials when they won against rated players in the recent tournaments. When a kid says thank you for the training after a game won, the feeling it evokes is something money cannot buy.
Late afternoons and early evenings seldom pass without the ice-cold beers at the tennis clubhouse. A bacchanalia happens every after tennis matches in the afternoon. Beers are flowing. The cacophony of voices come from drunken arguments as to who caused the loss of a game, or whose forehand has improved. Beer, and not death is the greatest leveler - after few bottles of beer, everybody becomes a Federer, Nadal, or a Djokovic. In drunken arguments, there is simply no loser; everybody is the greatest.
So too the court appearances which are now less frequent, thanks to the much younger associates who are eager to learn the ropes of law practice.
These and more activities, how can one write a blog, and an opinion column?
Yet if living is all but doing - playing, working, training kids, and yes, drinking beers, why the compulsion still to sit still, ponder, gather the thoughts, and pour them into a written piece? Why the urge to pound the keyboards with gusto?
Is living then not synonymous with doing?
