Why do people say, “Every day should be Valentine’s Day” or “We should show our love not just on special occasions?”
People do not readily “give love” when it’s not the “day of hearts,” let alone Christmas Day, and they certainly do not go around showering loved ones with thoughtful gestures — “just because.”
Most of the time, these days, everyone is too preoccupied, distracted, or too busy to care. We keep time to ourselves and only emerge from the funk of self-absorption when malls blare reminders we cannot ignore.
Ordinarily, we only see what is not there and fail to appreciate what we actually do have. It sounds new age, but it’s been true for ages.
Family, for some, is a fail-safe, so they end up taking them for granted. They think it would be impossible to lose something they have had since birth. This is the kind of thinking that usually guarantees failure.
Relationships take work, or as the cliché goes, it’s a give and take.
Even our pets reciprocate. They are some of the creatures put on this earth to love us unconditionally.
We cannot help but love them right back and care for them like it’s Valentine’s Day every day. I cannot say the same about people.
It being Valentine’s Day as I write this, I think about what love is — just like I did a year ago when I mused about Toni Gonzaga’s decision to support Bongbong Marcos’s candidacy, thereby risking her career at the network she used to call home.
In that piece, I decided it was love that made her do it — it’s the only emotion that makes sense for her to have taken such a risk (unless, of course, such a consequence never crossed her mind then).
This year, my ruminations on love veer toward family and bonds similar to family — whether this is at your work or in your social or civic ties.
In college, I joined the Sigma Delta Phi upon the invitation of a former schoolmate and family friend from my hometown in Albay. For one semester, 13 of us learned to become “sisters” by overcoming creative challenges as individuals and as a unit. We learned to work together and trust each other even though most of us were total strangers when we started. By the end of that whole exercise, we were sisters to the core. Up to now, our batch of 32 members remains solid even though many had moved to different parts of the world.
This sort of bond was something I never imagined I would have back then. In the few remaining years I spent at the University of the Philippines Diliman as a “sis” to so many wonderful ladies I still call my friends to this day, I learned so much more about the organization that I had joined as we became part of several socio-civic projects that the sorority organized.
SDP taught me to open my heart to others more — to understand that people are different but essentially the same. The sisterhood taught me about respect and acceptance and loving what you do and always doing the best you can in whatever situation.
SDP turns 90 this year, and part of the celebration on 25 February is the Mariang Maya Award, given every five years since 1983 to its outstanding members. The MMA was first established during the time of Editha Lazo-Arambulo ’53 and Betty Go Belmonte ’52, when they were president and vice president, respectively, of the sorority’s 50th anniversary.
This year, I am proud to say that one of my ka-batches, Frances Rivera ’89, will receive her MMA as an Outstanding Achiever in Broadcast Communications. My “global citizen” of a sis will come home soon, and we will embrace her back into our fold as if no time had passed, as if distance had not separated us. We are all still one, you see, sisters not by blood, but by soul.