Open Spaces

lost and found

by Jeneen R. Garcia

published on February 25, 2006

*my new column photo

 

 

In exactly five weeks, I will be officially unemployed. Although circumstances have helped bring me to this point, it is with exhilaration that I choose to finally be free from the office, and declare that I want to be a bum--a traveling bum.

 

When I told the news to friends and acquaintances, many of them expressed envy, congratulations, and best wishes. For my guts to actually leave the rat race, one said.

 

What rat race? Ever since I graduated from college, I’ve been working for non-profit organizations that let me dress the way I want (rubber sandals, sleeveless shirts, loose pants...what I’d call “in perpetual beach mode”), report for work later than most offices, and let me put my feet up on my chair as I type my reports.

 

At my office now, I have a large glass window that I open on lovely gray days to watch green leaves dripping with rain, the branches of trees wet and moldy. On sunny days, birds chirp their mating songs as I scrutinize a document. Even sandals can get uncomfortable, so I walk barefoot on the wooden floors, sometimes lying on a banig with my laptop and malong (which I keep under my desk, in case I get too wet from standing outside enjoying the rain, or too cold from the air-conditioning) when my legs feel cramped from sitting the whole afternoon.

 

Because my work is not profit-oriented, there is no “corporate ladder” to scramble up on, no sacred rules to keep to reach the top. I can be as creative as I want to deliver my outputs the best way I can, and gain instant gratification from going on fieldwork and knowing I’ve done my little bit to help make people’s lives better.

 

I know I am extremely blessed, first, to be employed; second, to be working in such an unrestrictive environment. Why, then, the need to be free from this freedom?

 

Because I’ve found that a window, no matter how large, will never show the whole sky. Because standing on a banca on a work-related trip in Bantayan, the sea stretching endlessly into blue air, we seemed to be floating in pure space, I realized that no four walls could ever be big enough to contain the world I want to live in.

 

And the world I want to live in is constantly growing, expanding into the rest of the universe even as I write; I want to be filled with it, to expand as it does, far beyond the familiar friendships and comfortable notions of the Earth being round or of time being 24 hours in a day. I want to walk barefoot not just on wooden floors, but also on the sands of unimagined shores, on stone steps where civilizations first learned to walk.

 

Because against the seemingly endless expanses of earth, sea and sky, I--my life, my achievements, my dreams--feel most insignificant, and paradoxically, also most loved, engulfed in a tiny glimpse of the heart of my awesome, infinite God.

 

I know that ultimately, I cannot contain the whole world, that sometime I must settle down in the comfort of a routine universe. As that day comes, I will anticipate it as heartily as I do this impending freedom, content to welcome a new season in my life.

 

But now summer is about to begin; the open spaces beckon.

 

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I just realized, ever since high school graduation, I haven't been based in one place longer than 4 years. On May 6, I will have been based in Cebu for four years.