Then the host welcomed them with her speech: “ This is not anymore the house you used to play around. The new high school campus is here. The buildings you used to spend your time have now been destroyed. Yet, we welcome you all to our home because it is in our hearts, in our collective memories.” No one indeed can take the home away, but can she possibly relocate a new home for the alumni?

A house is not a home, so the cliché goes. Wordweb says “the house is a dwelling” but a home is a social unit living together”.

He has lived in three cities and three provinces, and spent years in those different places. But whenever he was asked where is home, he always blurted the place of his birth, Libas, that place that wherever he would be, he still longed to return and revisit, to renew lifelong ties. His umbilical cord was buried there by a “mananabang”, one who assists in a delivery even though she has no formal schooling. Of the siblings, his connection to his birthplace is the strongest.

Way back in the school days, vacations and Christmas were not complete without going home to Libas. The place seemed to contain psychic energies that keep aflame the fire of life, when all the stresses of campus days gave way to charivari at night drinking “tuba” with childhood buddies, and recovering from a hangover by diving into the then pristine river. If the womb would nourish the fetus, Libas, his home, nurtures life.

But the home was lost. It started with the house. In 1984, super typhoon Nitang felled two coco trees near the house, damaging the greater part of the kitchen. The ancestral house was never the same since. Then, the dog which reached 13 years, got blind, sedentary, and then died. The dog, even if he were away for a year, never failed to meet him at the wooden gate, wagging his tail and jumping at him, as if reaching for an embrace. The saddest news struck: his grandmother’s brother died. There was no one left living in the house.

He cannot recall now when the last time his saw the ancestral house. The windows, the roofs, the pillars, without his knowing, slowly disintegrated that what he sees now as testament of his birthing home, are concrete posts.

The last time he attended the fiesta of Libas was almost a decade already. Together with a law partner, he joined a gathering of people watching a program, and then later on, public dance which the folks claim to be a “disco”. He did receive few handshakes from people whose name he could not recall anymore. For the first time, he felt estranged in the place of birth. Ah, could these folks not remember that for several years he was there in the stage to emcee the program which he orchestrated? And these wannabe bullies, could they not know that once, he was a “gang leader” here?

In a place that once was so familiar with you, now is a place where you become a stranger. How could it be when he thought he owned this place because his umbilical cord was buried here?

Where is then home now?

The host in that high school reunion told them that home is in the heart, that even if the old campus is now gone, there is a new campus which they can claim theirs. After her speech, he wanted to tell her, “ Our campus was the place where we played basketball, milled around, peeked at our young and sexy teachers, played out our foibles and whims – our campus was the only witness of the secrets of our batch.”

Sorry ma’am. Your new campus cannot be his home. The campus where he once belonged had been destroyed. There are new buildings which he could not associate with. True to worbweb definition though, “Batch ‘82 is a social unit” which is now finding a house which the batch hope, over time, after so many interactions, can be called home. Rebuilding the old campus is impossible but in the virtual world, they have found a house, where all the batchmates, who are now in different parts of the globe, can congregate, share foibles and whims, and in the journey in time, he may call this house - http://groups.yahoo.com/group/xuhs82/ - our newfound home.

To live without a home is to go through life without the beginning. Somehow, if the old home is neither here nor there anymore, one has to search for a new home, a place which nurtures life. Libas was once a home, but it has ceased to be one when one day, he felt he was a stranger, when everything else seemed alien.

Where is that home? The batch has found a house. But his new home is out there, in the process of making. Or, who knows, there could never be home anymore like Libas.

Then, Fr. Montero would proceed: “This is an immutable law of nature.” If you are dumb, you are bound to me one. If your I.Q. is that of a moron, then don’t aspire for post graduate studies.

May his soul rest, I indeed kept his maxim to the heart. No one from the class challenged his view. How can indeed a one-liter bottle hold two liters of water? From the classroom discussion, this seeming truism influence the way we relate to people. This child, given his I.Q., cannot take up law; that employee can never do this task.

Whilst science owes its framework from philosophy, the latter too has to bow to the superiority of the empirically demonstrated fact. The flat earth theory was a Mesopotamian thought that prevailed for many centuries, percolating in science, politics, and religion. Until Ferdinand Magellan circumnavigated the earth, the earth was then held not round. The whole system of knowledge had to be overhauled.

Then lately, contemporary medical findings have it that the neural networks that wire man’s brain can actually be stimulated by engaging the mind in both creative and analytical activities so the neurons multiply and create more linkages. The more linkages of the neurons, the more wired the brain is, and hence, the better I.Q and even E.Q a person have.

Science too may later on develop a bottle that even if it is designed to hold one liter of water, it may contain more compared to the present design because in the future, perhaps, even in between the molecules of the glass bottle, there may be nano particles that can hold up water. Now, you don’t measure intelligence by I.Q. The generally accepted norm today is multi-intelligences. The brightest of your kid, or employee, or you friend, may not necessarily be the best for the organization. The entire person is the package.

Are there really immutable laws of nature? The answer cannot be had in the near future. Philosophical theories are constantly being redefined by science, and the latter’s direction is being moulded by the contemporary thought.

Rigidity. Fundamentalism. Absolutism. These are anathema of the unfolding of human knowledge. Given the context, the right attitude is not dogmatism nor relativism. Dogmatism stifles the search for knowledge, and adaptation to something new. Relativism however leads to chaos. For sure, concepts and ideas may not be necessarily existentially true because one believes it to be so. The taking of soma plant during the Kali yoga ritual is not necessarily sound because they experience the 7^th heaven in their hallucinatory flight. There are certain universal virtues, not necessarily immutable truths that still keep humanity intact for millenniums now.

The attitude should be openness, the capacity to learn, listen, experiment, and adapt to new concepts. One does not have to die for a view which overtime have been proven false by verifiable phenomena. When the Oil Deregulation Law in the Philippines was enacted, consumers’ blood pressure shot up because that would mean pillage by the oil cartel in the Philippines comprising of Shell, Caltex, and Petron. That was in 1998. Ten years after, and after two months drinking with the top executives of the new oil player in the market, the new opinion has to be formed: the Oil Deregulation Law is good for the Philippine economy. The cartel of the Big Three is being slowly torn asunder by the many new players which roll back the pump prices ahead of the former. The hour per hour monitoring of the pump prices by this new player, JETTI Oil, is evidenced enough of the cut-throat competition going on. This is good for the consumers.

In human relations, openness is the key. One or two events do not a person make. Prejudgement, discrimination, bias, these three have no place in contemporary history that keeps on changing, and evolving. While as a human race, we evolve in knowledge; as a person, we are still in the life long search for identity, and in the process, revealing shades of the evolving persona.

How one wish Fr. Montero, S.J. is still alive, to tell him that his dictum does not hold now. But then he was a product of his time and place. No one should judge a person without judging the historical context he was in. And who are we to judge the historical context of the past which eventually, we the present, trace the long thread of the past, live the present, and project the future?

Had Fr. Montero been still alive today, the bet is for him to open up to the knowledge of the present, and adapt it. May be, even as he was still schooled in metaphysics and immutable truths, by now, he would live blogging his ideas into the virtual world.

Openness. How can you argue against?

When we are young, time seems too slow. During my elementary years, I wanted to finish fast so I would be in high school; and in high school, I wished time would pass fast so I be in college. But past forty, it seems that time passes so fast that you want that it would stood still. There are so many concerns you want completed that one desires for more time. I have seen people in a funeral, and wondered why people walk slowly as they lay the dead to the final resting place. Now I realize that the walk is precisely to bewail for the lost time not spent with the dead. If only we could turn back the hands of father time.

But time has to pass; so too this borrowed life. In the end, I ask, what are the things I have done, and things that I should do, so that in the end, I want everybody not to walk in the funeral but run as fast because the life once lived had been meaningful. If it were a sentence, the grave should be the final punctuation mark, a period, that to extend it would mean the loss of the magic the sentence evokes.

Meaning???!!! Ah, how many lives have been spent without really finding it, and how many journeys ending in a meaningless search. Once, I wrote about one’s meaning in life, and I received a rather harsh reaction from fellow blogger virtually called PAPA. The meaning of one’s life is not something cerebral; it is the way we live and relate to people, in perking up the otherwise mundane things; in celebrating triumphs and arising whole and intact from failures.

Today, I have forgiven in my heart the person who hurt me badly these past days. I could not understand why that despite the help I am extending, venom still comes out from her mouth. Even as she refused to acknowledge the wrong, and thus refuse my forgiveness, it does not matter. My hear is now cleansed. A poisoned heart is not at peace.

Then I recall Stephen Covey and his idea about paradigm. What makes man unique is not his genetic make-up. Science can make a clone, a close copy of the double helix of the original. What makes man truly unique is not his DNA; it is his perception of reality. A clone may have the genetic make-up of the original, but it does not have the consciousness of the latter.

When one arise from his bed every morning, he either sees the receding darkness, or the rising of the sun from the horizon. There you immediately see the persona, one distinctly different from the other. Among those who see darkness, the shades of the dark differ ; for those who see the rising sun, they too differ in their perception of the intensity of the light.

The challenge for human understanding and compassion, is to be able to see how the other perceives reality, the standpoint from which he sees the situation – in a word, his paradigm. Knowing and understanding the other necessitates viewing things from his paradigm. If one is able to do this, compassion prevails in his heart.

In my career too as a lawyer. I always try to understand the paradigm of my client, the adverse party, the opposing lawyer, and upon knowing where they come from, I tend to know what strategy they will use, and what measures needed to counter the tactics.

Yes, PAPA, it is not finding meaning but in being fully alive and awake, of passion for life that truly matters.

I have celebrated life with my relatives, employees, friends, even with unknown individuals. Bottles of beers have been emptied; tennis balls have been struck with precision and ferocity; tempers have flared-up; jokes have been shared; legal briefs have been written; and yes, tears too have been shed - all these in celebration of a life. Today is the best day to renew the passion for life, in real life and yes, even in the virtual reality.