WHAT MATTERS

CTALK By Cito Beltran
The Philippine Star 02/09/2007

Having opted to live a less stressful lifestyle away from the limelight or the Rat Race, it's but normal for people who made the choice, to sometimes wonder if they did the right thing.

They experience pangs of guilt about being under employed, less productive and certainly reduced in their income potential. While everyone else is BUSY making a LIVING, you ask yourself if it's a mature thing to be at home or semi-retired at the farm.

Are you wasting all your God-given talents raising kids, growing your own food, or simply living on very little money and simple needs? Shouldn't you be involved in today's politics, today's technology? And are your friends right about saying "Sayang Ka"?

Last month, a friend called me about an opening in a major corporation that was paying P300,000 a month, all the perks, and even a brand new Volvo. My friend asked me how I would react if the job was offered to me since I was very qualified.

It took me all of 5 seconds to tell her I wouldn't accept it.
To begin with P100,000 would certainly end up with the government as taxes. That would leave me with only P200,000.

To earn that, I would have to be at work by eight everyday, instead of coming up with imaginative tricks to wake up my daughter like placing her puppy in her bed, or simply standing over her watching this angelic child in her field of dreams.

I would have to eat breakfast by six, leave the house by 6:30. That means no more breakfast conversations with my wife and certainly an end to our morning prayers not just for us but for family and friends.

From the P200,000, I would have to spend at least P20,000 a month or 10% of net to pay for gasoline driving the brand new Volvo to office everyday.

So in effect, I would only be earning P180,000 or even less. Not to mention that my friends who sell Mercedes Benzes, Jaguars, etc. would brand me as a traitor.

From the net salary of +/- P180,000, I would have to give up the lunch I have with my wife 3 to 4 times a week at home.

Instead my power of choice adds another burden where I would have to decide daily where in the business district I ought to have lunch, merienda if needed, and from time to time even dinner. I would have to choose from a menu instead of whipping up something in my kitchen.

When you add up the bill, plus service charge, plus VAT you can easily average another P20,000 in expenses. Which means, that what we originally thought would be a net income of P200,000 has now gone down to P160,000.

In the absence of maintenance you can enter about P10,000 as your average monthly repair bill for labor and materials. So now, you discover you're only earning P150,000 a month.

Instead of being in a HOME I own, I will have to try to be "at home" in an office where I will be spending more of my "awake time". This finally solves the puzzle; why do we always fill our offices with personal stuff which we will have to take home in a box when we retire, resign or get fired?

From having my independence and personal views, I would then have a real live flesh and bones Boss (because of what I thought was P200,000 a month salary) can tell me how to jump! Someone who's seniority or proprietary rights automatically makes him right even if he's stupid.

Because you now have to spend most of the time at the office or behind a desk, you can't do your regular walk in the park or jog around the village which is also your bonding time with your spouse, your kids, or your dogs. You either join a gym or get a personal trainer.

When you total fees, travel, and outfits, your monthly fitness bill would be around P5,000 which means your net pay just went down to P145,000 a month or less than half the original offered salary.

My dear wife reminds me to include clothing and image-related expenditures specially for women. The clothes, the make-up, the jewelry, as well as the business accessories such as the laptop loaded with Vistas program, the latest cell phones, iPod etc.

Even if you paid all of that on installment for 24 months, it would be in the area of P20,000 a month which further reduces your income to P125,000 a month.

The problem with this major part of the expense is many people mistakenly call them necessary investments, professional expense, but don't see them as deductions from PERSONAL wealth.

It would also mean, not sharing the responsibility of taking our child to school, missing out on small talk that tell you big things in children's minds, and dropping out on all the parent-child activities.

I would also nullify all the adjustments we made in the last 5 years where we integrated home life with work in order to be more of a family than employees with a family.

Speaking of home life, anyone who spends a lot of time at work can testify that in your absence you will have to hire a full crew to do all the maintenance and repair you use to prevent or do yourself when you spend time at home.

In your absence, who's going to fix leaking roofs, flooded toilets, busted aircons, creaking doors, or all the usual things REAL MEN with real tools do?

If I actually went out to get the job that pays P300,000 plus a brand new Volvo, it would have cost me breakfasts with my wife, trips to school with my daughter, morning talks and prayers with God, affirmation of my role as husband, father. I would be relinquishing responsibility for my house, as well as my home.

What we've done is determine what really matters, what and how much we really need, give up what we don't need or care for and trust in God and not in men.

This is what I call real life cost-benefit analysis. To make an accounting of what we think we're getting against what we know we're losing. Sometimes earning more actually costs more.

Eternally beautiful

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Reflections and writing style of a 50-something Atenista.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Eternally beautiful
Humming in my UNIVERSE
By Jim Paredes
The Philippine STAR 11/05/2006

Exactly 29 years ago on Oct. 29, Lydia and I walked down the aisle. She was 20 and I was 25, both of us wide-eyed but so sure of ourselves and our decision to stay together forever as we plunged into matrimony. We were sure, the way young people tend to be certain, that it was going to be an adventure. But little did we know that it was going to be a big one, probably the biggest one we'd ever know.

Getting married is like signing a blank check. You have no idea how much it will cost you. You are committing an unquantifiable amount of material and emotional capital – time, money, patience, sacrifice, and an infinite number of things you have not even begun to imagine that you must deal with eventually.

Many of them are real minefields as Lydia and I, like all couples, soon discovered. There are the in-laws, kids, expenses, the balance between career and family life, personal habits, sex, jealousy, etc. There is also the process of arriving at a "negotiated settlement" on how to deal with things like getting along with each other's friends, child rearing, spending habits, religion, hobbies, and how much "independence" the partners should be allowed. The institution of marriage, as we inherited it, was very complicated.

One of the things I found out much later in our married life is that there is a difference between a love affair and a marriage. A love affair has a dynamic that is different from a marital bond. Generally, love affairs are not meant to last. They are meant to have a beginning and an end. Why? Because they are about two separate people bonded by romantic, oceanic feelings of what seems like love. They live for the intense feeling, riding it as far as it will go and split up when the thrill is gone.

Marriage, on the other hand, is the experience of life by two people as a couple. Many times, new couples discover that they are not an easy fit, as Lydia and I discovered early on. That's why in a marital relationship one must necessarily give up big parts of himself/herself to the union to get a payback. While one may still want some privacy and independence, one cannot have them without a large dose of a shared life. From the start until the end, marriage is about two people experiencing one and the same lifetime.

It starts with romance and the sexual thrill of being with each other, but you can only count on those for so long. Anyone married for more than 10 years can attest that there are times when the attraction which seemed so strong when you first laid eyes on each other as single people can be non-existent for long periods. Viewed from the perspective of a love affair, that is certainly not a good thing. One may feel like the journey has reached a stretch of uninteresting flatlands. The joyride is over.

But from the perspective of a long marriage, this is simply a hiatus of sorts, or may even be the first signs of a qualitative change in the way one loves. It can be disconcerting at first but if you stick around long enough, the picture starts to get clearer. While gone may be (from time to time) the breathtaking highs and exhilarating moments, something else may be happening. Author M. Scott Peck put it so well when he wrote that "the death of romantic love can be the start of true love."

In our early years, Lydia and I felt that being married meant we had to do something dramatic all the time to keep it going. But as we got older, the doing often gave way to just being. Where before, love had to be "proven" by the sparkling diamond on her finger, or the great trip abroad, or the special dinner with wine in some plush place, love in our 29-year marriage feels no compulsion to prove itself as dramatically. Having long walks, conversations after dinner, holding hands during long drives, snuggling in bed or just simply being together – sometimes without even talking – have often taken the place of all that. While sex can still be as great as ever, the truth is, as an older couple, we have discovered other ways to remain interested in each other. There is not only comfort but magic in the "ordinary," as one realizes that love can be expressed in simply caring or supporting each other's steps towards personal and spiritual growth.

One of the big recent highlights of our journey as life partners was Lydia's big cancer scare three years ago. We felt so helpless as we tried to deal with the fear of losing each other. But we took it on as a couple. As far as we were concerned, we both had cancer. Those were days of great emotional upheaval. Ironically, they were also moments of calm and assurance. Even as we cried about it, we also learned that we loved each other enough to willingly suffer together because, paradoxically, by doing so, we eased each other's pain.

This may sound flippant, if not cruel, but looking back, I can say that if I could only guarantee survival, I would recommend cancer to everyone because of what it has done for Lydia and me. It has been such a rare opportunity to meet and accept unconditionally the hard-to-take faces of love that we often run away from. Yet when we bit the bullet, we opened ourselves to greater depth and began to see the face of the Divine in the other human being we had chosen to love. Only then did we realize that all the suffering made sense.

In the end, the very suffering we undergo turns into something eternally beautiful.