Quiet Time

Pinoy Kasi : Quiet time

First posted 00:57am (Mla time) April 12, 2006
By Michael L. Tan
Inquirer



Editor's Note: Published on Page A11 of the April 12, 2006 issue of the Philippine Daily Inquirer

"PAPANIS ang laway mo" ["Saliva would turn rancid in your mouth"], a Boholano friend described what Holy Week was like for him when he was growing up. It was his way of describing how older Filipinos would impose a rule of silence around that time, and especially on Good Friday, a solemn and somber commemoration of Christ's suffering and death.

These days, I can't imagine a place in the Philippines where you still have that rule of silence. Some of the religious commemorations are still there, but by and large, Holy Week is a time for Filipinos to go off for a vacation: to Baguio City, Boracay or, for the more affluent, abroad for fun, revelry, sometimes even bacchanalian debauchery.

Across all cultures, there's always provision for some kind of holy day (or days) for silence. Particularly striking are the Balinese, who celebrate their New Year's eve with a lot of noise but for whom New Year's Day itself, Nyepi, is a time of almost total silence. All electrical appliances are supposed to be turned off; the roads have no cars, no motorcycles; even the airport will take only transit flights.

In the Philippines, all our holidays are festive except, until recently, Holy Week, and now that quiet time is gone too. Sure, in principle, some of us will still try to tone down on Good Friday, but that still means retreating to our homes ... to watch cable TV. Local stations will try to come up with some kind of semblance of religious observances by televising a church service, or showing old films with some vaguely religious theme, but these days, you can get around that watching DVDs.

We Filipinos fear silence much more than many of our neighbors. Buddhist and Hindu countries have strong traditions of meditation. Islam has its month-long Ramadan of fasting and reflection. We once had a quiet Holy Week, and that's gone now, so we just move from one noisy celebration to another in a holiday-filled year.

There's no time now for reflection, for introspection, and I wonder at times if that might be one reason we have so many problems. Without being able to take stock of our lives, as individuals and as a nation, we move around aimlessly, living, literally, for the next holiday.

Walking with trees

I'm not proposing that we move back into my friend's rancid-saliva season. Neither am I suggesting that we all meditate through the week. There are other ways to create quiet time.

We need first to filter out a rather noisy world: cable TV, stereo systems, the tricycles and jeepneys running by. You could join the exodus out of Manila and other urban areas, but I've tried that before and found the mad rush in bus stations and airports only gets everyone grumpy and cranky. Stay put in the city and you'll find it might actually be easier to find quiet-just make sure you avoid the television, the DVD player, maybe even the computer and the world streaming in through the Internet.

Then find some activity to calm the spirit. You might find it in gardening in your home. Or you might need to go out and look for an oasis. We still have a few of them even in Metro Manila. The Balara watershed area is one. Too "wild" for an urban cowboy? Then try some of our campuses, like the University of the Philippines (UP) teneo de Manila University.

I'll share a little secret here: I combine tree-walking with meditation at UP. No need to sit in the lotus position and gazing up at the trees. There's something called walking meditation where you empty the mind by just walking about. And at UP, you can actually walk with the trees.

No, I haven't turned New Age; no, I don't believe in levitation, or out of body experiences. I simply choose any one of UP's older buildings -- Quezon Hall, Palma Hall (AS to older people), Malcolm with its resident ghosts -- go to one of the upper floors, and walk down the corridors to take in the scenery, including quite a few trees.

I've written in the past about how the month of May produces a riot of colorful flowers. But it was only this year that I realized March and April produce their own early crop of flowers -- on trees. Too urbanized, too caught up in the din of modern life, we've forgotten to look up to the trees.

Palma Hall has all these kalachuchi trees that bloom throughout the year, but beyond the visual delight they offer, you'll find that you have to learn to be quiet enough to catch the scent of the flowers. Filipinos have mixed feelings about kalachuchi, sometimes associating it with the dead, but in many other cultures, the kalachuchi has much more positive connotations: of home and hearth, of female sustenance.

I'll save the life-giving kalachuchi for another column, but for today I wanted to alert you to a whole family of trees, the giant relatives of beans or legumes, that flower during the summer. You'll find them even in Metro Manila, from the nuanced delicate colors of the acacia, to the resplendent yellow blooms of the golden shower. This year, I began noticing another kind of yellow flowering tree, the yellow flame tree (for my biologist friends, this is Peltophorum pterocarpum).

This tree's flowers are more subdued than the golden shower so from afar, they provide an impressionist touch, flashes of yellow on an otherwise bleak urban landscape. There's a particularly awesome example in between UP's Main Library and the Palma Hall Annex (the psychology department). For those looking at other campuses, you'll find still fairly impressive examples on the Miriam College and Ateneo campuses.

Bring a digital camera and capture some of those trees for posterity. At the rate we're going with environmental pollution, we just might lose these trees in a few years, and the next generation of Filipinos may have to content themselves with the photographs.

What should be

I have the psychology department's yellow flame tree as my computer wallpaper theme right now, and friends have asked about it, some even thinking it was taken abroad. Which is telling. We associate placid and serene landscapes with other countries, rarely with our own.

Quiet time allows us to tune in to what's here, what's around us. Even in our backyards, in our blighted cities, nature struggles along, teasing us with moments of fleeting splendor: plants you never knew existed, until they flower; birds you might never see, but which try, almost defiantly, to remind us they exist by singing out.

Quiet time slows us down and allows us to savor life to its fullest. Try creating quiet time by preparing a slow meal: it may take longer to prepare, longer to consume, but you'll find the food tastes much more like, well, food that nurtures the body, the mind, the spirit.

Similarly, as we quiet down this Holy Week, realizing how restful it is to have a relatively quieter, car-free, less-crowded city, we might better appreciate the need to craft a vision of what Manila, Cebu, Davao, the Philippines should be or, better still, could be.