Rational Insanity
By Bryan Mari Argos

Goodbye friend

The classic farewell is always a moment of confusion. Most people don't want to let go, and so, go through mixed emotional pangs before finally being able to say the world's most difficult words to say – goodbye. Sometimes, we have a choice of whether to say goodbye or not, but most of the time, we are left with no choice. This brings me to our topic for this week; the inevitable moment of farewell when the choice is always having to let go.

When I attended the World Youth Day almost ten years ago, I saw Pope John Paul II for the second time (the first was in 1981 in Iloilo , but I was not really that mature to appreciate the moment then). It was during the day of his arrival when we had to line up along the streets of Roxas Boulevard with the burning sun staring down at us. When the pope mobile passed by right in front of us with JPII in it, waving and smiling at us, I felt this deep, electric sensation that drew me to JPII like a dessert to the sea. I can only speak for myself though, but I can clearly recall the wonderful feeling this holy man created in me. It was a mixture of joy, comfort, and peace – something some of us will probably never feel in our lifetimes. From then on, I considered JPII as a friend; someone who would be there, watching over me even from a distance.

When he left the country after WYD '95, I had the choice of whether to finally say farewell to him or to keep him in my heart for all the days of my life. When the news of his death reached me last Sunday while I was in an L300 van traveling from Iloilo back to Roxas City , I realized that I was not ready to say farewell to him because he promised me and millions of young people all over the country that he would come back to the Philippines . On the outset, I also realized that I was never really actually saying goodbye to him, in effect, I chose not to and never to, and so the thought of him, his smiling face, his wave of benediction, remains in my heart forever.

The lesson that most of us should draw from this incident is the supposition that saying goodbye is not really the way it is until we decide to totally block the person out of our lives, which, in essence, is impossible to do. Whether we like it or not, some part of some person who played a significant role in our lives always remains. We may be too jaded to recall the pains that got us in the past, but all we are actually doing is denying that these things happen and we can never deny the existence of anything unless we believe that these things exists. This brings me to the real purpose of goodbyes.

In Hawaii , they say “aloha” to mean from “hello” to “how are you” and even to “goodbye”. This alone proves that, at least, in some part of this world, there is a group of people that actually parallels the meaning of “hello” to “goodbye”. For starters, this basically means that if we only dig deeper into our heart, the matter of saying goodbye does not really exist on a certain plain. Goodbye, put simply, is just a word, coined to obviously stand counterpart to hello, like black is to white, and dark is to bright. Humans are so obsessed with having something to cancel out one thing that we tend to trivialize emotions, or even worse, attach a totally disconcerted word to a very valuable emotion.

Goodbye comes from a late 16th century word that means “God be with you”. I bet not many of us know this. In other words, I can always say goodbye to a person at any time, or at any moment of the day, such as saying goodbye to someone who says that he needs to go to the toilet. So, if goodbye has such a general meaning, what then could we say to mean that we have to part with someone and/or something? If you ask me, one thing most of us should learn is that there is no such thing as goodbye. There may be a physical parting, but it stops there – no other parting occurs aside from the “physical” form that the emotion of parting takes.

Goodbye does not exist for me and it should not exist for anybody for that matter. If goodbyes cause so much pain, why are we so assumptive to the point of supposing that we eventually say goodbye to somebody sometime? Why can't we just scrap the word from our vocabularies? I'm sure none of us are masochists.

On the brighter side, we should all know that life is just a journey, it may end one of these days for some of us, but it's simply a matter of going from the ferry boat to the train…and so my love affair with life continues, just as a pessimist would view a glass as half empty and an optimist would view it as half full – I consider death merely life's elevator – where some people consider death as the end, I would consider it as a beginning.

Goodbye – este – God bless you, friend.

Be rational; be insane…every once in a while! TTFN!

Hi to Mon, hey, what's the score? Hello to my dearest readers, Chan, Vic, Vincent, and Rex, Alex, Arvin, Corz, Jim, Kiara, Malikh, Mr. Pampolina, Audrae, Franz, Hendrick, Janice, Jay, Jim, Jonathan, Mark, Marz, Mel, Pres, Nhonoy, Niel, Piper, Rheavil, Joey, Alma, Rodolfo, Ecker, Ryan. Hello also to a new addition to our RI Barkada, Roni, thanks for the great comments, to Miss Dieter of Lapaz (sorry you didn't tell me your name, hehe) to Ian of Bacolod but who is in Iloilo right now, to Narle, Sunny and to Anuj of CMC, I love you all! Byers! Salamat gid sa mga walang-hintong text and reactions nyo! Catch Rational Insanity in TNT's online edition, check us out at www.thenewstoday.info, text me at (0920)9254269, or email me at prague@eudoramail.com .