A VALENTINE'S TEASER: WHAT IS THE OPPOSITE OF LOVE?

 

Looking at the blank computer screen in front of me, just like any writer hitting the keys for a takeoff in composing a piece, all of a sudden, I flirted with writing about LOVE – a thematic topic, perhaps, inspired by the February ambiance hinting that Valentine’s Day is just around the corner.

Lost in thought, I Google "Love." It gave me five billion-plus entries topped by an article from The Guardian: “I am happily settled, and yet I still think of my first love. Will it forever hold me in its sway?” A personal essay, I sighed and didn’t click.

I Google “best definition of love.” Two billion-plus entries topped by Merriam-Webster: 1. a feeling of strong or constant affection for a person… 2. an attraction that includes sexual desire: the strong affection felt by people who have a romantic relationship… I yawned.

I Google “best Valentine gift.” Four billion-plus entries topped by an ad: “When love is all around, health and happiness are sure to follow. Treat yourself this Valentine’s Day with…” Hmm.

Shortly, I turned to my old books on my shelves. I spotted “The Road Less Travelled: A New Psychology of Love, Traditional Values and Spiritual Growth” by Dr. M. Scott Peck. I flipped through the shriveling pages of the book gingerly. Published in 1978, the book is so aged that the brownish newsprint pages have been unfastened from its spine and were only being kept intact by its soft covering. It defined Love as:

“The will to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth.”

A unique title of one particular chapter caught my eye: Entropy and Original Sin. Entropy means a “gradual decline.” One striking line invited my interest: “LAZINESS is love’s opposite.” (Underscoring mine) So, that is the answer to this article’s Valentine’s teaser. The lead paragraph I excerpted below:

“[Love,] [b]eing about spiritual growth, this book is inevitably about the other side of the same coin: the impediments to spiritual growth. Ultimately there is only one impediment, and that is LAZINESS. If we overcome laziness, all the other impediments will be overcome. If we do not overcome LAZINESS, none of the others will be hurdled. So this is also a book about LAZINESS. In examining discipline we were considering the LAZINESS of attempting to avoid necessary suffering or taking the easy way out. In examining love we were also examining the fact that non-love is the unwillingness to extend one’s self.” (Underscoring mine).

Right before I started composing this article, I had read Solita Collas-Monsod’s PDI column “A Catch-22 Situation for Marcos Jr” on his failure for the second time to join a presidential forum. One possible reason she cited was wearisome: [Marcos Jr.] “would have no qualms about the Filipino people any other time.”

At this point, I could not help myself recalling PDI columnist Ambeth R. Ocampo’s “Marcos Sr. on Marcos Jr.” where looking back, he revealed Marcos Sr.’s diary content -- one entry about Marcos Jr. stands out:

“Bongbong is our principal worry. He is too carefree and LAZY. So I wrote him the fatal secret of the Marcos men – ‘they are brilliant but LAZY.’… The boy must realize his weakness – the carefree wayward ways that may have been bred in him.” (Underscoring mine).

The naked truth is straight from the horse’s mouth and anyone can easily connect the dots to come up with a very clear and solid figure of a lazy man aspiring to become the leader of our country. In Valentine’s Day folklore, Marcos Jr. is like a man trying to woo the heart of a woman – the Filipino voters. If you’re a woman, would you say “yes”?

The book “The 21 Indispensable Qualities of a Leader” by John C. Maxwell listed a good deal of qualities a leader must possess, ranging from Character to Vision, from which I picked out three pertinent ones for our discussion:

1. Commitment: It separates doers from dreamers.

What is a commitment?

To the boxer: it’s getting off the mat one time more than you’ve been knocked down.

To the marathoner: it’s running another ten miles when your strength is gone.

To the soldier: it’s going over the hill, not knowing what’s waiting on the other side.

To the missionary: it’s saying goodbye to your comfort to make life better for others.

To the leader: it’s all that and more because everyone you lead is depending on you.

2. Self-Discipline: The first person you lead is you.

“Talent without discipline is like an octopus on roller skates. There’s plenty of movement, but you never know if it’s going to be forward, backward, or sideways” said Author H. Jackson Brown Jr. All the more, when one is low on talent.

3. Problem-Solving: You can’t let your problems be a problem

Author George Matthew Adams wrote, “WHAT YOU THINK (underscoring mine) means more than anything else in your life. More than what you earn, more than where you live, more than your social position, and more than what anyone else may think about you.” Every problem introduces you to yourself. It shows how you think and what you’re made of.

The above three basic qualities of a leader, among others, require a deliberate thinking process. It must disturb us to fully grasp how Marcos Jr.’s laziness could crucially impact his thinking process. Nobel Prize laureate Daniel Kahneman in his book “Thinking, Fast and Slow” wrote:

“The ease with which [students] are satisfied enough to stop thinking is rather troubling. LAZY (underscoring mine) is a harsh judgment…Those who avoid the sin of intellectual sloth could be called “engaged.” They are more alert, more intellectually active, less willing to be satisfied with superficially attractive answers, more skeptical about their intuitions. The psychologist Keith Stanovich would call them more rational.”

From the above, thinking ends when laziness begins, because as Dr. Peck stressed:

“Thinking is difficult…complex…laborious…painstaking process…until one becomes accustomed to being ‘thoughtful’.”

In college, in the 70s, one time I dropped in a typical dorm room amid a chat session in progress among roommates, as always, about a campus hottie’s vital statistics. To jack up the chatter a bit, I cut in to start the ball rolling on a more cerebral yet captivating topic on how to steal the hottie’s heart. In the next breath, someone said in a jest. “Pare, ang hirap mag-isip.” It hit the nail on the head. Such a knee-jerk reaction calls to mind its close cousins: “pwede na yan” band-aid solution, “para madali” short-cut mo, “bukas na yan” “mañana” habit – the trademarks of the infamous Juan Tamad moniker.

In 2017, this question bannered in a news headline: “Do you live in the world’s laziest country?” Smartphone data from more than 700,000 people from 46 countries included in the study were collated by scientists to show just how active different parts of the world are. Guess what? PH was the 4^th laziest country just a notch over the lazy trio of Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, and Malaysia. Smitten with the Yahoo News writer’s wit in spinning this dismal news item, I could not help myself in excerpting it below:

“Before you get your gears grinding, let’s face the idea that we are, in fact, lazy in general. And that is not mostly our fault. Even Jose Rizal admitted our laziness, yet he defended the Filipinos by enumerating the external circumstances that molded us to be lazy or seem like one. In his 1890 essay Sobre la Indolencia de los Filipinos, Rizal… Ok, never mind. Got lazy there.”

Let me end this article with Dr. Peck’s somber quote on thinking and a crucial question on laziness to the Filipino voters:

“One of the major dilemmas we face both as an individuals and as a society is simplistic thinking -- or the failure to think at all. It isn’t a problem; it is THE problem.”

Do we want a lazy role model as our next President?