When storms strike

By HERBERT VEGO

AS I was writing this yesterday, scattered rains were falling across the country due to the low-pressure area being monitored by the Philippine Atmospheric, Geophysical and Astronomical Services Administration (PAGASA).

Located in the North Pacific Ocean, east of Guam, it was identified by its international name, IN-FA”.

Since PAGASA has no power to divert the typhoon path, we can only hope and pray it will dissipate.

We typhoon victims are prone to fear of severe weather conditions. I, for one, still shudder at the thought of the flood brought by typhoon “Frank” in 2008. It drowned my useful things, including an old typewriter and a camera.

But the sight of a spider reweaving its wrecked “home” inspired me to shift to positive thoughts.

In such destruction, I console myself by thinking that I was luckier to have survived where others had died. I remember the famous phrase, “When the going gets tough, the tough get going.”

Sunday this week (November 😎, we will commemorate the 13th year since super typhoon Yolanda swept across Leyte, Cebu, Iloilo, and Palawan.

If natural disasters were literally “acts of God,” I console myself, then they should be interpreted as tests to be passed in order to win the game of life.

Each of us has undergone bouts with hard times that go beyond cruel weather.

At age 24 in 1974, I applied for a job at the office of then Information Minister Francisco “Kit” Tatad in Malacañang. That was two years after the late President Ferdinand Edralin Marcos Sr. declared martial law.

The receptionist, however, asked me to talk to a certain Major Vicente Tigas first. I did as told and approached the desk of a good-looking Philippine Army officer in uniform. After interviewing me for about five minutes, Tigas shrugged, “I am sorry. You used to lambast President Marcos in The Quezonian.”

He was referring to the school organ of Manuel L. Quezon University.

He advised me to see another military official at Camp Aguinaldo as soon as possible.

I did, only to be asked to sign an affidavit pledging to write well of the President. I signed but vowed to myself not to go back to Tatad’s office even if I badly needed a stable job in my second year as a married man.

To soothe my sunken spirit, I turned to inspirational books, including the Bible.

I read about Sir Isaac Newton, an English physicist who had never been an outstanding student. When asked by a newspaperman how he had discovered the law of gravity, he quipped, “Just by constantly thinking about it.”

I remember a high school graduate running a vulcanizing business, Antonio Tulalian, who dreamed of owning a building. He focused his mind on that dream very intensely until a friend offered to lend him money with which to put up a four-level office building on Serrano corner 11th streets, Caloocan City.

My family rented a room in that building.

The power to harness the magical forces of the mind is available to everybody, according to immortalized positive-thinking American authors like Horatio Alger (1832-1899), Napoleon Hill, Dale Carnegie (1888-1956), and Norman Vincent Peale (1898-1993).

“What the human mind can conceive and believe,” Hill wrote, “the human mind can achieve.”

Once there was a man who, desirous of having an easy job, sought the advice of the late American preacher Henry Ward Beecher.

“Young man,” said Beecher, “you cannot be an editor. Do not try the law. Do not think of the ministry; neither manufacturing nor merchandising. Abhor politics. Don’t practice medicine. Don’t be a farmer or a soldier or a sailor. All these require too much study and thinking. My son, you have come into a hard, hard world. There is only one easy place in it and that is the grave.”