On New Year's
resolutions and dreams

One of the most useless things in this world is the New Year's resolution. One makes it. And does not follow it. Sometimes even doing the opposite. It's like confessing a sin, then committing the same sin again and again. And confessing it, also again and again.

Is it bad? No! It is not even useless. What a boring thing this life is if we all make a New Year's resolution, then follow it to the letter. Not only will we be a bore. The whole world will be too.

And by that time, we will not need priests to confess our sins, no more police to enforce the laws, there will even be no need of laws, no more prosecutors, no more judges, and no more jails. And also especially so if one who confesses his sins, he sins no more.

So, go ahead. Make your day with your New Year's resolution. You need not feel guilty if you violate it. You are just being true to form.

***

You wrote, an elderly friend told me, that when your Sunshine Boys went to Cagayan de Oro you were all very well behaved. Is that true?

I said, yes. I then was told our group was a big bore which I admitted justifying it by the absence of our lover boy Pompey Querubin who could have lost the title to Toti Ramos and Buc-an Yulo was willing to give up the title of being the most spiritual.

You know when Buc-an could not make it he would tell our chair Ric Yanson he would be there in spirit. Buc-an complained Pompey was not there in person nor in spirit.

I can vouch Pompey was there in spirit. We talked over the phone. PAL flight was cancelled. I told him Toti was planning a coup d' etat and he was the subject of talks.

Toti Ramos, Buc-an Yulo, Pops Jalando-on, Celoy Sarcepuedes, and even debonaire Ed de Guzman could not replace the inimitable Pompey.

***

Mischievous men, not the well behaved ones, I was told, are the ones who are more interesting. Oh, I said, I would tell that to SSBs.

Girls don't like boring men. They don't want to be bored. I said, many well behaved fellows also want to bore girls. Then I laughed.

What did you mean? I was asked. I said "bore" can be a noun, an adjective, or a verb. She wagged a finger, "You are mischievous!" Then, she added, and you wrote Galeno's and de Guzman's favorites are too young. I said, the song, "Too Young."

It's good to be called mischievous.

***

You see now, that New Year's resolutions are really not that bad.

Long, long ago, I had a New year's resolution which I have kept and followed it to the letter, never violating it.

My resolution was not to make New Year's resolutions. What do you do? I was asked. I said, I only dream. I'm a dreame

Many things in this world have been the fruits of dreams. Not the result of New Year's resolutions. The many humble things I have achieved in life were the fruits of my dreams and not of the New Year's resolutions.

A poet, O'Shaughnessy I think, once wrote that the "music makers and the dreamers of dreams, wandering on lone sea breakers and sitting by desolate streams are the world's movers and shakers."

And do you remember that song by Stephen Foster of our time, "Beautiful dreamer, wake unto me,/ Starlight and dewdrops are waiting for thee." I cannot recall the other lines.

As poet Berton Braly wrote that at the rot of every success is a dreamer who makes a dream come true.

***

Scottish writer Robert Louis Stevenson was once awakened by his American wife, Fanny screaming in his nightmare. Robert admonished Fanny because actually he was in the last phase of his novel which later came out to be "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde."

Wrote a well known Swiss psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung that without fantasy, no creative works cold have seen birth. He was Freud's friend.

He added, "The dream is the small hidden door in the deepest and most intimate sanctum of the soul…"

Dreams are the propelling force of ambitions. One who does not dream gets no direction in life. For dreams dominate the subconscious more than it influences the conscious mind.

***

While many of us were writing many years ago in other papers restricted by the private interests of their owners, we writers dreamed of coming out with a paper of our own where we could write professionally because of the paper being run professionally.

That was how DIALY STAR was born.

I have also dreamed of having a radio station some years ago but the plan was aborted because of some fortuitous events.

This time, that dream might be realized when I open a cable television soon. I have already sat with Sky Cable and with some prospective concessionaires and will finalize things this week.

I started discussing New Year's resolutions. Now I am ending up discussing dreams.

I like that grade school song "Row, row, row your boat/ Gently down the stream,/ Merrily, merrily, merrily,/ Life is but a dream."

We are merrily rowing our bat down the 2006 stream, dreaming that 2006 will be a joyful and merry ride.*

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