maalaala mo kaya?
What is your best memory? Is it when you first saw a giraffe? Or when you graduated with a laude? Or that when you go out of town with your family in Tagaytay? When you almost got drowned? Or the simple ones like when your nanay puts on a hot towel on your forehead when you were sick? Or when you friends and family teased you when you first shaved? Or even when you still count the stars?
I also got my share or wonderful memories, be it like the big ones like when I graduated in college (almost a laude, sayang may tres ako sa rotc) or plain ones like when my nanay carries me to my bed when I got asleep to my cousin’s room (do you remember that? Such heaven di ba?)
I also got bad ones like when my father died, and after fifteen days our house then also followed him in heaven (as in na-demolished, maybe God thought of my papa’s den there), and of course like of everyone else’s…saying goodbyes.
But then happy or sad, I treasure them simply because those happenings in my life is the definition of Leviuqse, it is me and my story (kahit bad memories pa yan, sabi nga di ba “today’s bad times will be tomorrow’s good old times).
Kaya minsan nakakalungkot pag may pumapanaw tayong kapwa, kasi isang mundo ang lumisan, isang buong kwento ang nagtungo na sa langit.
There are times where in you are smiling nonchalantly by your self, you can’t help it, especially when you remember some good jokes, a funny scene in your office and even those events that had happened years and years ago that just flickered out in our heads, surely doesn’t fail to put a beam in our countenance, but on the other side of the coin it also sometimes makes us contemplate, ponder, think and cry.
Memories
Mémoires
Gedächtnisse
Memorie
Memorias
Alaala
are what we call them, a mental faculty of retaining and recalling past experiences, an act of remembering…a recollection.
It is really very astonishing and inexplicable how a certain event or experience becomes some kind of mental videos that is securely stored in our heads and is always there whenever we wanted to watch (recall) it.
In the events that we have a funny tale that we have witnessed or heard, we are very eager to recount every bit of details of the said story to our colleagues.
And in some occasion that depression and sadness devoured us because of some certain occurrence or ordeals that we have stumble upon, we also ran to our loved ones to ask for shoulders to shed tears on.
Sometimes I muse that what and who we are now, is because of the enchanting thing called memories, our guise is somewhat like a large piece of a jigsaw puzzle and the small fractions or the puzzle pieces can be taken as the “alaala” that makes up the big picture that’s us.
Be it good or bad, happy or sad, memories plays a momentous part of how we view life, of how to think, of how to act, love, care and a lot of so many other things that is essential to our brief stay in this planet.
At times that I ponder about God’s existence, those memories that made me laugh out loud (even by my self), smile (even at myself again in a public place, complete with a nginig factor of my balikat cause im fighting the laugh), cry and reflect and all those huge and even those diminutive things that in one way or another made me more adamant towards life…there’s just one thing I realized…may Diyos talaga.
