A Personal Eulogy

Today, I assigned my public speaking students to prepare for a two-minute read speech. They have to deliver next week a personal eulogy. Morbid, [ikr] I know right. That was the same reaction I had I when went through writing my personal eulogy, more than five years ago.

The term eulogy is derived from the Greek word "eulogia" which means good words. This type of writing or speech is delivered to honor a person or any thing. Traditions put eulogy as an important speech to honor the recently deceased. Thus, it is often heard during necrological services or funerals. Perhaps, its appropriateness in honoring the dead is to lighten the feelings of the bereived.

So, the eulogy gives a review of hallmarks in the lived life of the deceased. It is not a biography but strings a heartening narrative of how well the person lived his life.

It was an excruciating, yet a transforming experience for me to write me personal eulogy. I was afraid of death, it was one of my greatest fear, but not to the point that thanatophobia would impair my dispositions in life. It just happened that I lived a life afraid of what's going to happen next in my after life and to my loved one's when I was gone.

It would have not been possible for me to write my personal eulogy, had I now overcome my fear of death. That's another story though. But, I was motivated to write my own, when I began to understand that individuals have the power over their life affairs and choices in life, if they could write their own life script. All lifescipts have endings.

The self-help guru, Stephen Covey, was right when he said that to be highly effective, one needs to begin with the end in mind. So, I had to think of how I would desire my life to an end. Of course, that was a fulfilled and completed. I had project how I would like people to think of me as person when my time comes to an end. It took me several days before I lifted my pen and draw out from within me, desires of how I wante my life to be.

That was one of the steps I took so I could manage and take in charge of life. In my silence, I visulalized my body lying on a coffin and went through imagining what I would like people to hear about me as to how I would have lived my life. It was transformative for me, because the process helped me to identify milestones and hallmarks of the various aspects of my life - my career, my financial state, my emotional state, my values, my relationships, and my faith.

Likewise, the process brought me to a realization of the life continuum and the power of self will and self-discipline that God would also like His children to acquire. It empowered me in a great sort to establish my self and my dispositions in relation to the things that I do now. It also allowed me to see my frailties in the past, which I need to deal with to fulfill how I wanted myself to live my life.

It was also mushy for me, I did shed some tears after knowing that I can actually create my life script. I was mushy then because, my life was really topsy-turvy at that time. I succeeded though. Fact, many of the things that I wrote in personal eulogy had transpired, and I began to appreciate life at its best as lived with personal control.

It made me happier somehow and it gave me a positive perspective about death and its connection to life.

Moving Forward

Time is an element that we consider to have influence on many of our affairs. So 2012 is here and it must be time to be moving forward and that means letting go of some memories that made us anxious in the past. This is not easy though, but it is really necessary.

In retrospect, the faults and follies we've experienced are products of our very own choices and people of course are involved in these. Should we then forget the people who caused those actions that hurt us? That perhaps is the only means that we can free our selves from its haunting anxiety.

We may have met people whom we thought were best for us, but consequently we realized that they are not what we thought they were capable of. That they had motives we were not able to understand in the times we felt we're happy with them. Then suddenly, right in our very eyes we get to know that all is but a lie.

People like these should be left behind in order for us to move forward. Yet, it is not easy, because a simple of thought of them pools a ripple of memories, sweet and incessant alike. How then do we erase such bad memories of our past? How is casting off our worries to the waters possible?

Detachment is the primary thing we have to do. That is to objectify the past we had with those people and the memories that go with them. Detachment is extrarational, that we had to treat the experiences we had with those people without our emotional attachment, from this moment on. We can do this by considering the past as something we had to go through so that we learn in the events that unfolded. More importantly, we can not let the past determine our future if we are to move forward.

The past year may have brought us both good and bad memories. Whichever we hold unto could affect our present way of thinking. We need to fill our mrind with good thoughts if we want to act positively. That means we have to find the right anchors to ponder about in retrospect and in our introspections of how we did in the past. That also means letting go of fond memories of people who hurt us. In such way we are allowing ourselves to have the right dispositions to move forward.

Past is past, now is the time to be moving forward.

What this world's teachers should celebrate?

So there's this dedicated day for the world's teachers. Wow. That should flutter me. I am happy being one and each day of going to school to meet my students, the completion of a lesson and the demonstration that students learned something from me are enough compliments.

How I wish that one day for a teacher could be spent by affirmation and some relief from the stress of educating minds, both the diligent and the difficult ones. That's just a wishful thinking, for me, since I learned to accept that I was called for this profession and it is my apostolic ministry. Teaching being the noblest profession is I think the most difficult one, for those who have imbibed in their mindset and life system what teaching really is.

So what should a teacher celebrate? I guess, those many small things but are not valued by many in the world: having a chance to have shared even a piece of knowledge that has occupational application; having inspired a soul to have commitment to a life-changing decision; making inattentive students laugh awhile; knowing a student answer right, but who happens to always be wrong; hearing a student think aloud even though his view differs from what is commonly held; getting hold of a student's painstakingly worked learning output; and definitely seeing a student graduate, who happened to have spent very long years in school.

I have personal reasons to celebrate when my students excel. I am happy too, when I see my students commit to changing their mindset and their behavior towards learning. I have met too many difficult learners, including those that some teachers dare not to take in their class. I do, because I know that my obligation to teach is not just a plain work at all. To me, the becoming of teacher is only measured by being able to help the "hardest" to be taught learn to fend for his own learning.

On each day that I would meet my students, I have a personal measures that I am making an impact. That count to my knowledge of how effective I am in the class. It is beyong the systematic measures of evaluation, that students answer by shading numbers. Call it hunch or mere gut feel, but to me that is the most authentic means of knowing how effective a teacher is.

One, when students volunteer to do some favor you ask. Two, when students really inquire on things related to the lesson. Three, when a student say's goodbye to you with a thank you when you dismiss them. Lastly, when students can remember your name, because that is one anchor for all other knowledge that you have imparted to them.

I am not a perfect teacher. No one is. But, I try to be one damn good teacher, by avoiding what I hate from those teachers I have had. Yeah, I did have bad times with some teachers: with my first grade teacher who blamed me for some else's annoying behavior; with my third grade teacher who did not include me from being accelerated because I was a transferee; with my fourth grade adviser who whipped me with a stick because she could not manage my talkativeness.

Even when I reached some age, teachers had hot eyes on me: with my fourth year adviser who campaigned against me with my classmates; with my college teacher who failed me in a subject she moved on another schedule that caused my failure because I could not attend frequently; and with a university dean who sued me and other student paper staff because we unjustly vexed her manipulative act to shut the paper down. I love you all my dear teachers, you have taught me so much from all those things.

I have been in the academe for more than fifteen years. I have taught local and foreign students alike, here and abroad. I have met both the best and worst students in several schools. Though at sometimes I envy my friends who are earning well in the corporate world, I find myself a million times satisfied with where I am. Money could not buy that joy I find in this profession.

When I run across students whom I have taught, and they greet me -- there I know I am a teacher. That is an affirmation to me that I am someone who have been a part of one's life at one time or another. This world can never be what it is now, without teachers.

Happy teachers day to every mentor in the world! To my teachers who taught me, thank you for making one like you. Thank you my Rabbi for making me a teacher too.