Mula sa mga kukong nakipag-agawan sa mga kuko ng liwanag.
Contrary to the premise of essay-writing in Theology or Humanities classes (formerly Christian Life Education or Values Education), our online musings, or perhaps what we say to console friends over the phone, I believe that the character of man is sifted out most purely when he is given the least possible time to think over what he is to say or write or do. It is an instant of interplay between impulse and instinct, not lengthy plans or prose or structure, that gets one to show his true self.
One could call me, for example, kind at heart or a completely plastic individual, for what I did awhile ago along Taft and Padre Faura.
A man grabbed my necklace while I was walking back to UP in the rain. I thought it was my friend playing around with me, but when the tugs got harder and began to hurt, I knew I was being robbed. I grabbed back hard and won the broken chain and three Crosses. I looked back at the man. I stared at him. I stared at him long and hard and angrily. He was staring back, and even when I was more than ten meters away, we were staring at each other through the crowd and the rain.
I wanted to hurt him. I wanted to vent my anger at him. But I didn’t, or I couldn’t. I could have been fearful for my life—but then again, he had nothing dangerous on him and had already failed, prior to his stint with me, to steal a lady’s bag along Taft (which my friends and I witnessed)—or I could have forgiven him, understanding the consequences of poverty on the individual’s psyche—but I did not, in that instant, recall anything I had ever been taught about social justice or morality.
Not for a long time, while I was jittering and thinking about the infinitely many number of ways that minute could have gone very wrong.
Notes
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