no fast forwards, no flash forwards - acquaintance party 2015

There is always that part in us which crave for answers and resolutions.  There is always that part in us which wants to know how things would end.  This is the reason why we get glued to the cinema screen to get to the bottom of the story, this is the reason why we get the urge to go back to our TV sets at a particular time every night so that we will know the ending of the tele-serye we started weeks before, that is why we can’t put a good back down for hours on end.  We have to get to the bottom of the story. And sometimes to do so quickly we fast-forward things.  We speed up the story taking it out of its timeline by going to a point in the future.  In our musical play Isko we have done something like this when we created three Iskos in rapid succession singing kontani lang.

This is what we also did tonight – more or less.  We treated formation in a fast-forward manner, we even did what we call a flash forward creating a kind of prolepsis in order to get to the bottom of things, in order to get into the future as quickly as we can.  And not only that we used a quick fix that would transform things in the timeline we desire.  This is drama, this is musical play, this is fantasy but this is not life.  There can be a prolepsis in story telling but not in real life.

One of the disadvantages of a prolepsis is you take out the suspense and the drama of a story as it unfolds.  You are already revealing the outcome, you are cutting short what could be an exciting blow by blow account.  Or one would even be led to think that it is that fast and that easy.

This very night we start what would be a lifetime of formation, a lifetime of continuous transformation and growth – going through the boredom and the routine; getting over with the obstacles and the challenges at every turn; flying and skimming through the joys, and fun, the laughter and the brotherhood; getting stuck once in a while with failures, sadness and crisis; getting up and trying once more when we fall and miss the mark.  It will be 14 years, 365 days a year 7 days a week, 24 hours a day.  There are no shortcuts, no fast forward, no flash forward.

Is it long? It depends.  When you love something the waiting is nothing.  Good night to all of you and here’s to an exciting year ahead of us.