Old Habits

When we complain about the Filipino's tendency to have a short memory of his nation's history, to be soft to his most brutal adversaries, and to be forgiving of the gravest mistakes committed to his dignity, then we naturally ask how this came to be and why is it still so. The answer: we relapse into old, bad habits easily because we never bothered building up a national stamina for sustained hard-work, no drama politics, and for prioritizing service to others above personal comforts.

When you want to summit a formidable mountain, you want to build up stamina first and the lung capacity to withstand thin air. When you want to run or cycle through a long marathon, you want to condition your body to function well even with sustained exertion. If you want to be effective with thinking and executing long-term, you have to be effective with what needs to be done in the present term. 

If Filipinos are disappointed with our slowness and ineffectiveness, if we know that more can be done but we always seem to come up short for our countrymen, if we feel that many of our problems could have been resolved long ago if only we had the will to fix them, then we can only blame the fact that we did not do our necessary collective pre-work. Much like how the old story goes, when times are good we simply lie under a fertile tree and wait for the low-hanging fruit to drop to our open mouths as we take a nap. We never really trained our minds to think of and prepare for the winter even during springtime. So we always end up scrambling for crumbs during lean times.

Maybe because we don't have the four seasons to teach us how to prepare for winter. Maybe it's too hot and humid and it causes our laziness. Maybe there can be a thousand other excuses if excuses are what we are looking for. Pag gusto may paraan, pag ayaw...

The truth is, even in countries with four seasons or whatever other advantage we think they have, they still had to do the requisite pre-work of their nation. They had to build up the habit of hard-work and foresight. Hard-work most especially. Any advanced and stable nation you can think of is known for the no nonsense, no drama, hardworking sensibilities of its people. Sure, they may have another side when it comes to leisure, but they know that work is work. And again, work does not start or end in the workplace. A hardworking and serious streak is not like a faucet you just turn off and on. It is conditioned through time. It is discipline built through a pre-work routine. It is a consciously developed good habit.