Friday, January 19, 2007

Breaking Free

Remember a time when you wake up in the morning and the first thing you hear is some familiar tune and then you end up singing the tune for the rest of the day. For me now, it has lasted for a week. During the recent Christmas Holidays, my younger sister kept on singing some familiar tune. She had a CD of it and she had it wherever she went to. It was the High School Musical Soundtrack and I can just wonder what the movie was about. Then coming back to Baguio my roommate has an answer to my curiousity -- he had a DVD of the movie (of course together with some others which were really the ones he wanted to watch). To make the long story short, I watched it and have since seen the movie for like five times. That's something considering that for one, computers are now illegal (for the underclass that is) and that its not like I have a lot of free time to spare. But then the movie struck something in me, maybe my love for singing or just this fantasy of going back to high school and having a blast of a good time. In the weekend that followed, my room mates bought the soundtrack and it has been playing inside our room ever since. Now, I am looking forward to the day it will be played in the mess hall while the whole Corps is eating.
I do not know if there is something interesting with teeny movies that has caught the liking of someone who is practicaill living in some isolated place. The truth is that I do not care. But let me just say this. In all of us there will be things that will capture our fancy, things that will just give us that form of comfort and relief. This things may not be necessarily popular to the crowd that we belong to. To everyone, I think there is just this "dark" secret that we keep hidden because it is different but then again more than being entitled to our own individuality is the courage to stand for the things that call our hearts to break free and be the persons according to who we really are.
In Paulo Coelho's the Devil and Ms Prym, the characters of St. Savin (a hermit living near the town of Viscos) and Ahab (the acknowledged founder of Viscos) are somewhat figures that explains my point. Although I do not really want to reveal the story of the book, the thing with this characters is that they somehow illustrate the kind of people we usually are. Although everyone can relate to the other characters in the novel, the two stand-out because they acted on what their heart was calling for. The whole story somehow revolved on the dillema of the inhabitants of Viscos wanting to be accepted in the community. In the clincher, there has to be someone who had to take a bold step, a leap of faith if I may say, to make people understand the value of their own individuality and being the real person that they are. The devil and the gold bars were just stimulus that caused the story to happen the way it happen in Paulo Coelho's novel.
I guess my point in this entry is that although the world that we are in can be vicious to those who try to be different, it is never a reason to be indifferent. Yes we have to deal with society but to lose our individuality along the process is a greater crime that is not only bad but also betrays the person that we were intended to be. I know that I will never be the person that everyone will like or be proud of, but I know that when they do it will be because of who I really am and I'd rather be that person that someone who desperately altered himself for others.

No comments: