It’s half past 2 am and I’m still here facing a blank page. I’ve been the better part of 3 hours hemming and hawing, unable to begin this “essay”— not for want of a topic but precisely because there just is a crowd of topics to choose from. If it were a matter of a buffet lunch, I’d be on the fourth or fifth dish in a few minutes; but essay-writing, delicious topics not withstanding, is quite another kettle of fish. It’s mostly bones and scales; it’s never whales.
What kept me more or less on an even keel in this frustration-heavy scenario was my having to go to the loo half a dozen times to oay my diuretic dues from having guzzled to 5 or 6 mugs of strong coffee with very short intervals much as Balzac was reputed to have done to keep his wits on the qui vive whilst writing one after another novel in his La Comédie Humaine series. It was coffee overdose that abbreviated such an interesting life. Up to 50 cups several nights a week: he had to be coffinated sooner than later.
But I have wandered off course quite a bit. I simply meanted to express the counterproductivity attendant upon or consequent to our efforts to ensure wakefulness over the long haul. This brings me to my intended topic of discourse. No, it’s not Descartesian at all but a great deal less formal rather tangential, hoppity-hopping along like going about on a pogo stick.
The thing is, the more one tries to ensure focus by trying one technique after another in hopes of arriving at a desired level readiness for the task at hand, the more one gets to be swayed this way or that discomposedly, and so the less chance one’s initial intent gets even to the first base. In such a set up one loses sight of the target and begins instead to have second thoughts about the project. One begins to suspect that one was not competent or knowledgeable enough about the matter and had best junk the endeavor altogether. In a word, Qoheleth’s taunt gets once more to be clearly heard: “Vanity, all is vanity.” Thus, in Hamlet’s words, “Conscience makes cowards of us all” and since mortification feeds upon cowardice, where will that land you?
You put your original plan on the back burner and try to brazen it out by chanting the Spanish cop out: Mañana, Mañana—or in Filipino: Mamaya na. Mamaya na. Never underestimate the Pinoy’s copping out resources!
