Mt. Zion - Taytay, A Decade Later

The Little Rotunda of Mt. Zion Memorial Park - Taytay

It has been so many years since the very first time I visited Mt. Zion Memorial Park - Taytay.  What looked like a desolate, barren and forgotten subdivision is now a park lush with greens and trees and bustling with gentle activities.  The transformation is very vivid in my mind.  I am one of the few persons who have watched the site grow and change and cultivate its reputation as a "cannot-be-missed" landmark along the very busy Manila East Road.  The riding public has known the place to be just Mt. Zion.  Ask any jeepney driver using the east route about Mt. Zion and they sure will drop you right at the entrance of the site.

The most interesting thing about Mt. Zion Memorial Park was how it circumvented the myth that a cemetery does not encourage good business in the area, one of the reasons why people leaving near the area resisted the construction of the project 12 years ago.  In the contrary, Mt. Zion Memorial Park brought with it prosperity and development at the site.  Manila East Road is now lined with commercial establishments the likes of which can only be seen in a high density and highly urbanized location.  From selling just P5,000 to P7,000 per square meter, the strip now costs a whooping at least P40,000 per square meter.

But the best thing that happened to Mt. Zion Memorial Park is not just the trees that have grown skyward, or the greens that covers the blocks like carpet in the hills, but the relationships that it has cultivated between its clients, brokers, salespersons and other investors.  A place which anyone can truly be proud of.

Personally, I want to be in Mt. Zion where family members and friends gather for a moment of remembering.

Run for Pasig River 2011

"Where are you now? I'm already here at Ospital ng Maynila. Our group will start from here. You should be here by 5AM!" It was 3:30AM and the voice reverberated in my room in the quiet of the early dawn. The call came from Ms. Bebian Lo, our company's Senior Vice President for Sales and Marketing.

Two days earlier, Ms. Bebian made a last ditch effort to have our group join the Run

for Pasig River 2011 organized by the Gina Lopez-led ABS-CBN Foundation, Inc. (AFI). She gave us eleven registration forms complete with race shirts and race numbers, free of charge. I think each set should have cost the participant at least P450.00. Thanks to Boardwalk, her younger sister's fashion and apparel company which co-sponsored this major environmental concern activity alongside Air 21, Midas Hotel, DOTC, Lopez Group of Companies, Metro Rail Transit Corporation, Prudential Guarantee, ExTribe and other cause oriented groups, we will be saving our weekend allowances.

Online registration was already closed but Ms. Bebian has managed to ask Boardwalk to include our group in the last batch of participants which will be encoded manually by the monitoring group.

The event was listed on a global scale, having broken the Guinness World Record in the most number of participants in a marathon registering a total of 116,086 runners last October 10, 2010 or intentionally 10.10.10. This year's run hopes to break last year's record breaker. But the greater task is to generate funds to help sustain the rehabilitation of Pasig River. This is what AFI has set out to do and arduously strives to achieve since 2009 when the campaign started to gain momentum after the establishment of the Kapit Bisig Para sa Ilog Pasig (KBPIP).

Our group, composed of last minute recruits from Mt. Zion Memorial, Inc. (Rod, Jocelyn, Abel, Mon and myself), Fil-Estate Management, Inc. (Jackie), Global Estate Resorts, Inc. (Tet), Malay Resort Holdings, Inc. (my wife Hapi) and Universal Robina Corporation (Ina) all agreed to convene first at the Renaissance Tower at 4:00AM, Sunday on 11.20.11. Rod's group decided to go ahead via EDSA going straight to Roxas Boulevard as Hapi and I almost missed our cell phone alarm rings. The call from Ms. Bebian made it all the more urgent and exciting. As expected, traffic was incredibly heavy starting from the approach to EDSA MRT Station all the way up to the Mall of Asia. I followed Mon's advice to go left immediately upon reaching Roxas Blvd. and make a right going to the DFA and breeze through the SMX parking area. We almost did it but not quite, as we got caught up in the middle when all vehicles grinded to a halt. The race has begun! And we're going to miss the big event.
A call from Rod, Abel and Mon added to our frustration hearing that they were already on the race and have already joined the group category of 10K run while we were stuck in the middle of the road. They were at the opposite direction coming from the Uniwide Coastal Road area. We were nearer going towards Petron Gas Station along Macapagal Avenue where the 3K and the 5K race categories were happening. Assessing the situation, we left the car in the middle of the traffic jam, suited up for the race and joined the fray halfway along the race - a classic shortcut to the finish line. There were very many runners and walkers with different groups coming in throngs of varied colors - a festive atmosphere, indeed.

I've heard that the biggest contingent came from the Polytechnic University of the Philippines with at least 15,000 entries. ABS-CBN posted a remarkable 5,000 plus runners. It is quite notable to see happy faces doing the marathon or should I say walkathon. The volume of participants occupying the road made it impossible for the runners to run as there is no more space ahead to cover for more energetic stride. All one needs to do was to keep up with the pace of the race and that was to walk . . . albeit leisurely. In my poor estimation, the participants that came that day far exceeded what was needed to break the previous year's record breaker. I think around 150,000 runners attended.

Reaching the finish line was our greatest achievement that day. And our prize was nothing less than exhilarating - a bottle of Smart C and a pack of Champion powder laundry soap. I would say that the real winners of this Run for Pasig River 2011 were those who came to shed a few extra pounds and sweat; those who came for bonding with family members and friends and those who came to share an insignificant portion of their fortune to bring back to life the once majestic and poetic Ilog Pasig.

Our hand salute to AFI and the organizers.

Struggle from Within

On occasional visits with friends, I sometimes see a natural beauty of nature miniaturized in a small flat tray. I actually appreciate the beauty but never gave much attention to how it came to being.

I am talking about a bonsai. There is always something in this work of art that touches your inner self and imagination. This art coupled with a lot of science actually originated from Japan, hence the word "bonsai" which means literally "small". The fundamental concept of bonsai is called"Keisho-sodai" which means "small size, great similarity". And it was only very recently that I started to dig deeper into appreciating this newfound hobby.

In a hurried world, going into bonsai art is like going against the tide of fast-paced way of living. We live in a world where everything should be done fast and comfortable. So we have fast food, fast ferry, fast internet connection, fast ticket, expressways here and there, fast computer upgrades, accelerated college courses... and the list can go on and on... Bonsai making goes on the reverse.

It is actually a balancing act of having a healthy plant which growth is stunted through root and branch pruning and a delimited source of soil nutrient. The art challenges one's capacity to wait, and in most cases to intentionally slow down the process and painstakingly wait for the desired result - Keisho-sodai.

They say that patience is a virtue. It is indeed a virtue specially when you’re involved in bonsai making. It is like a clock without hands so that it becomes timeless. It thrives in a world of its own, amid the chaos where time is suspended. As I gaze intently on the roots of my ficus benjamina that now hugs the little block of concrete, I wonder when they will ever grow bigger than my pinky. Maybe years from now. One leaf a day.

Outside, the bonsai brings calm and gentleness. Inside, one will never see the struggle of every small root trying to absorb the limited nutrients in its harshly made environment. It is that same struggle inside that brings out the best of the tree - a beauty to behold. What a stark similarity with what the bible teaches, “fire purifies the gold.” This brings to memory the story of Job and you know what happened.

Just One More Time

Someone once said, "The day you get angry at your failures is the day you start winning." Translated, winners are simply ex-losers who got mad. We have always associated success to winning in whatever field - be it sports, corporate affairs, sales, politics, economics, religion ... literally in everything. And everybody will be measured. Question is, "by which yardstick?" It's quite difficult to do measurements as it is quite even more difficult to find a perfectly even playing field. It's a good thing Albert Einstein invented the greatest excuse for differing results - the theory of relativity.

Going back to the ex-losers, I mean, winners, I'd like to say that success is measured or achieved by getting up just one more time than you have fallen. Everybody makes mistakes but the problem is very few learn from those mistakes. Worse, they embrace it and forever live a life of obscurity and misery. The great challenge is to get up every time you fall and to keep up the good work and finish the race. Life is not about pristine and unblemished records. Sooner or later, Floyd Mayweather, Jr. will be slapped with his first ever loss in his boxing career. And if that loss will not come from Manny Pacquiao, it will be from someone else. Nobody is young forever. Father time is just lurking at the corner.

In the physical world, everything can be measured. And so they say that which you cannot measure, you cannot manage. However, I find beauty and relevance in things that cannot be measured. It gives us the license to bask in the great feeling of amazement. That is why we marvel, we stand in awe. In mathematics, there is a symbol for infinity because mathematicians knew infinity exists. Even the great physicist Albert Einstein acknowledged that there is a vacuum inside the human heart that only a divine being can fill. So let's not be dependent on the physical attributes because they all fade. Let us use the energy that makes a person glow even without the batteries - our heart. When it's aflame, it can very well propel a man to achieving greater heights, or simply to get up just one more time than you have fallen.

Lola Loves Me

"Come down now... we're here at the lobby." This sounded more like of an anxious pleading than an exasperated request from Happy. I have kept my wife and May waiting for me at the Renaissance Tower lobby a good twenty minutes after office work. I was actually finding an excuse not to join them in their nocturnal safari for inexpensive branded clothes at Mega Tent, an upscale tiangge just a stone's throw away from where we work. I don't want to go with them because I really hate shopping for windows, I mean window shopping. You stroll around the place, pick up and examine some really cool and nice merchandise and pray that the price tag is colored red. Otherwise, you move to another booth and then to another section and then to another and... now that's what they call shopping for windows, I mean window shopping, whatever. My best alibis didn't work at all because just a few minutes later, I was magically converted from a junior executive into a senior chaperon.

But just like in any other forced adventure that I have had, something good comes out. I found this really cute white t-shirt for toddlers with a print "Lola Loves Me". It is quite unique and I was thinking this item is a product of "Research and Development." Frankly, I am not as interested as just getting a well-designed and labeled t-shirt but the word "Lola" is a touch of a genius. Believe you me but the line in queue is surprisingly not composed of senior citizens but of middle-aged moms and dads who are more than willing to shell out the extra P250.00 just to accommodate a would-be gift to their sons and daughters. I bought it not because it will look good on Barjae, my one-year old but because my Mom would be pleased to see the label on Barjae's t-shirt - "Lola Loves Me."

Well, I'm looking forward again to a new I-don't-know-when and I don't-know-what adventure. Here's hoping to strike a gold mine next time.