Friends in Photography

I've added a new category for my smugmug.com galleries-Personal Photography. The photographs in this category are meant to complement my writing projects as well as provide a place for images I want to share with family and friends.

Already I know I need another category of photographs, my photographer portfolio. I need a little more time (and a lot of work) to start collecting images for what I want to be my show-off, hopefully assignment-getting galleries. I recognize that the images that I currently have on my website are not good enough. They certainly do not "amaze," one photographer's single standard for his photographs.

On WFYI tonight I watched Two Million Minutes comparing how two high school students each from China, India and Carmel, Indiana spend their time. The program showed how much harder Indian and Chinese high school students study and their much greater focus on science and math proficiency. The program claims that young people in India and China believe their future lies in these fields of concentration.

During my youth in the Philippines, we believed our future would be better if we became lawyers or doctors. Times have changed. Merma and I did become physicians and this became our ticket to come to the States.

What was particularly rousing about the program was how it reminded me of the corresponding time in my own life. In high school, life seemed simpler although when I was living it life certainly did not feel simple. At the almost pastoral setting of the La Paz branch of ICC high school, the outside world was miles, worlds away. Yet at the national exams for graduating seniors I ranked number two! Performing academically back then was a heady experience. I thought I would make my mark as one of the top people in a field by the time I finished school. I was on a roll.

All that changed in my junior year at UST. My little world disintegrated. I lost confidence in myself and from then on avoided competition like the plague. I learned to efface myself. Eating humble pie became second nature. I was never bright anyway. My academic performance and it was performance came from working twice as hard as the next student. Today I miss the intensity, the competition.

In tonight's television program, U.S. high school students were reported to rank higher than their Chinese and Indian peers in only one regard: self esteem. Chinese students spend twice as much time studying compared to their U.S. counterparts. 250,000 Chinese were studying English compared to 50,000 Americans studying Chinese. Chinese and Indian students thought their American counterparts were living a dream life. Americans live comfortably. Even as high school students they have much greater choice in how they spend their time and what direction to go with their lives. Indians and Chinese want one thing only: to raise themselves financially and materially. Americans are not so motivated.

Perhaps we in America still have the edge on people even in such fast-growing countries as China and India. Opportunities for success are still more numerous and easier to come by in America because of our social and political structure. In the end this might still decide superiority in our favor although the idea of superiority is changing too  in our increasingly globalized economy.

What all this means for me is a revisit to my youthful energy and revisioning the future I am aiming for. Photography is well and fine but art has never been my forte. I have to find my voice even this late in life but it is neither in art or literature. Finding one's voice is mostly the confidence, perhaps audacity, to live actively and be yourself, always challenging the limits of the known and barreling into a future I don't need to control so carefully. The future is the world still unexplored and like Yahweh we create it with our voice.

Ultimately it is not voice that I seek but pitch. After all these years maybe I can resurrect the idea of excellence. I have lost so much time already but if I look and look well and long I might still find the seeds of excellence that I once had and shoot again not to get my arrow into the neighbor's field but clear up into the sky.