The Abundance we Suffer
by Eugenio Jose F. Ramos, MD
With the horrible things that preoccupied us at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, we probably didn’t notice that good things also happened. The sky cleared up, ambient noise disappeared, expressions of love came spontaneously and often, priorities were rearranged under forced discipline in a lockdown, and aggravations in our head cooled down. Today, after the worst is over, we are hopefully able to see the past and the present with more clarity. Bad things did happen to good people, and bad people are still around to put us on our toes. The rich are as comfortable as ever, and the poor have remained despondent. Regardless of the lessons, the good and the bad will flourish. Depending on the default mode of our orientation, we are either grateful for the blessings that we have or perpetually stuck in a recurrent state of inadequacy. When we think about it – if we give ourselves time to reflect- our needs are simple, it is our wants that confound us.
Back home, we have a 10-cu. ft. frostless ref and a 10-cu. ft. freezer in our kitchen, and a smaller ref by the bar adjoining our living room. The freezer is north pole to me as well as my wife who is a busy physician like me. All 3 appliances are open for exploration, a source of both pleasant and unpleasant surprises when necessity beckons. One Christmas, my wife discovered a turkey at the freezer’s farthest end of the uppermost layer. Carbon-dating fixed its ice-age at 18 months. I had heard somewhere that a turkey becomes most tender when aged in the freezer, which saved the day for our cook. We had a tasty unplanned turkey – at least half of it – that Christmas; the unfinished half was probably kept in the ref beside the freezer – a half-way-house of sorts– for a few more days after Christmas, unless the people in the kitchen finished it off right after the dinner. (If nobody remembered a whole turkey, who would remember half a turkey!).
The big frostless ref is opened more frequently, of course; no ice to dig food out of. After I bought a separate hot-and-cold water dispenser, however, I have been opening it less. When I do, there again is another reason for consternation! When our children were very young, the ref chronicled their “unfinished business”, e.g., half-empty tetra-paks with straws sticking out, half-consumed cake slices and sandwiches, or unfinished glasses of milk from the breakfast table, perched randomly on containers and boxes the contents of which are eventually smelled, taste-tested and vetted for human consumption. Any ounce of doubt lands the food into the garbage bin. Since the ref is frostless, no ‘icebergs’ serve to remind us that another cleaning is in order. The memory of the last cleaning is not the basis for the next; there is no such memory. Cleaning the ref becomes imperative only when molds are discovered, and everything else inside quickly causes dread. The ref has become a parking lot for over-ordered food deliveries and uncompleted overindulgence, a snapshot of abundance that hasn’t travelled down the gastrointestinal tract. Last week, for instance, I saw 2 half-empty bottles of salsa of the same brand in 2 different locations inside. Since the salsa lover is my son and he would only open the ref to look for what meets his eyes, and since his mother seldom opens the ref herself, the likelihood that a salsa “out-of-stock situation” in the pantry would trigger a trip to the supermarket is real; it happens all the time.
The smaller ref by the bar is south pole to everyone because we rarely linger in that part of the house. It is an exclusive repository of fruitcakes, chocolates, and other sweets. Almost all are gifts and pasalubongs (by their glut, we no longer doubt why diabetes has become an epidemic). Our fruitcake collection is enviable – from the ones that look expensive by the nature of the nuts that they embed to ones that are given as a token of get-it-over-with thoughtfulness. A first-in-first-out policy in serving fruitcakes is employed, some of which have been in the ref for 2 years (not because we like to hoard, but because nobody remembers that they are there). I tell the househelp to serve the fruitcakes to people who drop by the house – especially their own relatives – along with the ground coffee from the hinterlands that has lately become another common giveaway. But they always forget because other than the fruitcakes (just half a dozen so far this season, welcomingly replaced this year by rum cake), there are still cakes in boxes on the kitchen table that must be given away first. Indeed, sugar is the common ingredient of most giveaways every Christmas, poison only to those who can resist putting a slice in their mouths. The cakes at home are in addition to the “thank-you” cakes that my wife and I regularly receive (with resignation) from well-meaning patients in the clinic and the hospital. We give them away to our secretaries, the nurses, and the residents, preferring to focus on the pleasure of giving instead of the adversity that sugar causes – something like offering present gratification over the health hazard that may or may not happen in the future. All in the spirit of Christmas!
But this is not just about food in and out of refrigerators, we can check our closets, too. We see clothes and neckties, scarves and barong materials, hats and accessories, and shoes and belts – all gifts – in random states of disarray, some still in boxes, used no more than once or never at all. Among many of us, our living rooms, bathrooms and bedrooms, too, are a repository of air purifiers, scented candles, Occitane hand lotions and soaps, kitschy decors – accoutrements of style that clutters the senses. Every Christmas, we exchange gifts with friends and family; we give, and we receive. In some instances, we give because we received. The usual giving-and-receiving cycle becomes a closed loop among friends and colleagues – an picture of urbanity that conjures exclusivity and inaccessibility to many Filipinos who have to work for daily wage. It is, in fact, an insensitive exchange among materially blessed people with big refrigerators that are seldom opened, and closets that are full of unused clothes and dusty boxes. We in the medical profession give each other gifts because we refer patients to each other. We love to give gifts to people we appreciate; we relish receiving gifts from people who appreciate us. But the gifts, themselves, we seldom need, rarely use, or eagerly consume.
But, of course, it is the thought that counts!
As we elevate humanity from the pits of materialism and captive utilitarianism, and acquire the sophistication for simple decency and civility, how we wish that in time people would learn much simpler ways of expressing profound gratitude, and to expect nothing more than the sincerity and sufficiency of such a gesture, without having to give or receive in excess that contributes to waste and clutter. Waste aggravates global warming and environmental degradation, not to mention molds in refrigerators, poor health and obesity, decadence and misaligned values. Why can’t we give because it is the right thing to do, and not because we must? For whom do we give, really, when we give away what we have in excess, what we don’t want, or when we no longer have space in our homes for the next batch of gifts and purchases for the holidays? What joy is there to give away what we don’t value other than it saves us space?
I still practice, on occasion, a ‘panata’ to load my car’s front seat with fresh goodies – even the ones I like to keep (good fruitcakes, included) – and drive around during the Christmas season. At traffic stops, as the street-children swarm around the car, I bask in the opportunity for redemption. In their younger years, my children would join me in the car – with the toys that they initially did not want to give away. Seeing their faces glow as they handed over their favorite toys to the street children was bliss. Giving to refresh our values and reorganize our priorities is not really a selfless act, but it’s a good start. They say it is wrong to give to these mendicants; it will spoil them. Mother Teresa had a rebuke to this: “What’s wrong with spoiling the poor? We have been spoiling the rich all these years!”
We, physicians, have been spoiled for a long, long time more than we care to admit. We have been receiving blessings that are easily overlooked because we mix them with – or mistake them for – what we think we are entitled to receive. The pandemic seems to have evolved a new way of adapting to the virus of materialism that sets the lucky ones apart and further spurs social inequity. No doubt, the medical profession makes us more comfortable than most. The rest of our fellowmen are not as fortunate, hanging by the clutches of inequality and uncertainty amid our abundance. We now see blatant greed undisguised, as colleagues give in to the vulnerability of their needs and the vagaries of their want.
Perhaps, we should be less dependent on freezers and frostless refrigerators so we could discern what is fresh from what has molds, what we should preserve from what we should let go. Unless we find the time to reexplore where we came from and how we began, who can tell how many succulent turkeys there are buried in the thick ice of insensitivity, just waiting to be rediscovered – to awe and transform us!
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