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I am "THE MAN"



“It matters not how straight the gate,
how charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul."

From
“THE INVICTUS”
By William Ernest Henley
1875

A humanistic approach to life – that is what EXISTENCE is all about. As a man, we don’t wait for a God to control our lives. We don’t expect a God to unveil secrets that will mold who we are. Only the man knows himself. The man as existence makes choices. He takes advantage of freedom, and most of all, he takes full responsibility of what he does.

As a person in this world, I never had any doubt that no one else, but myself has the power to drive my own life. I am who I chose to be and that isn’t about to change.

There are times when I still ask myself why I am in the academe. As a college student, I never dreamed of becoming a teacher. But look where I am now and see what I could do now which I never thought I could. I now get a YES answer when I look at the mirror and ask my own reflection this question, “Is this what you want in life?”

In two weeks, I would have to celebrate my seventh year as a teacher. If you’ve seen me seven years ago, I hated the word teaching. I felt I was floating—waiting for opportunities to knock on my door – because I thought of teaching as something I didn’t have passion for. I thought I wanted to be a full-time writer or a primetime reporter or even a segment producer for TV. None of these happened, not because I lacked opportunities to grab, but simply because I eventually found my niche in the academe.

I realized that I could be a teacher and still be a writer. I realized that in teaching major subjects in Communication, I could also be as resourceful as a primetime reporter and be as creative as a segment producer.

So what is the point? I am who I am right now because of the choices I made in the past. Had I chose to leave teaching and go somewhere else, then I won’t be here trying to prove I have developed love for wisdom—that is philosophy.

I will always be who THE MAN is – an element whose existence is defined by freedom, choices and experience.

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