In the Parable of the Good Samaritan, Jesus teaches us the profound lesson of loving our neighbor. The Samaritan, an unlikely hero, saw a wounded man and showed him compassion, while others passed by. This story challenges us to go beyond societal boundaries and personal prejudices, extending kindness to all, even those we might consider strangers or enemies. In our daily lives, we are called to act as the Samaritan did—offering help without hesitation and loving others as ourselves. May we open our hearts to God’s love, reflecting it through our actions towards everyone we encounter.
100 words on ‘being’ between Heidegger and Levinas
Heidegger and Levinas both explore the concept of being, but from different perspectives. Heidegger’s existential analysis in “Being and Time” focuses on “Being” as the essence of human existence, emphasizing individual authenticity and the nature of existence itself. For Heidegger, understanding being involves confronting our own mortality and the concept of “Being-toward-death.”
Levinas, on the other hand, critiques Heidegger’s approach, arguing that it overlooks the ethical dimension of existence. In “Totality and Infinity,” Levinas prioritizes the “Other” and the ethical responsibility we have towards others. While Heidegger seeks to understand existence in isolation, Levinas emphasizes relational ethics and responsibility as central to being.
100 words on Another Person’s Moment
Gazing at another person’s moment in time involves deeply witnessing and appreciating their unique experiences and emotions. It’s an act of empathy that transcends mere observation, allowing one to connect with another’s lived reality. This perspective fosters understanding and compassion, revealing the intricate tapestry of individual lives. By focusing on these moments, we acknowledge the significance of each person’s journey, recognizing their struggles, joys, and transformations. This practice encourages a profound respect for others’ experiences and fosters a sense of shared humanity, reminding us that each moment is a vital part of the broader human story.
If you are like most writers, your first hurdle is how to start writing. You may have cultivated the habit of journaling or writing in your diary, yet when it is time to write that book you have been dreaming about, you end up staring at the screen, or in a dramatic showcase of frustrated writing, your trash-can overflows with crumpled paper. But when does writing commence? Writing begins when you sitdown and write.
IN BRAINSTORMING YOUR SUBJECT
As soon as you begin encoding letters, words, and phrases, you are already writing. Rarely will the codes you type be considered final sentences and expressions of your ideas. But whatever they are that you have initially penned, those are your starts. Those ‘brainstorms,’ are sparks of creative insights that may or may not find their place at all in the final document.
A common misconception about brainstorming is that it is a random formulation of subjects from a clash of many heads. But writing is the job of one single person at one set continuous time. The brainstorming is done by only one creative head who will inevitably talk to itself alone throughout the writing process. This means that the author-originator must be deliberate with a free and unencumbered brainstorming. If in the process they end up with more than three pages of nonsensical and unorganized thought, so be it. Stop crumpling the paper, but save the document with a date, and dating subsequent revisions as well, keep the initial drafts on file.
Brainstorming yield your first thoughts in writing. You may not yet be aware of your subject but are biased towards an opinion or viewpoint. You may not have yet established how you’re going to package your ideas, but are leaning toward a form. You may not be fully informed but eager to research and dig deeper into a topic. Whatever your leaning may be, brainstorming will light them up for you so you will find the way toward a vision for a project.
IN GATHERING YOUR REFERENCES
Research is a fearsome word. The stereotypical impression is that of a scholar buried under a pile of paper, glasses falling off her face as she reads through pages with furrowed eyebrows. However, as a writer you need to seek out the relevant literature at the very start. You need related texts to capture the free fall of creative imagination. Research will give you a framework. It is a wisdom catcher that will bring your ideas together. Resulting citations will have made you check, suspect, or validate assumptions and presuppositions. You gain authority in the subject matter at hand.
IN JOURNALING YOUR EXPERIENCES
What about the process itself? Writing is a reflexive exercise. Once you sit down and write, you are very much aware of your process. How efficient is your method of writing? How disciplined? How relaxed? How egoistic? How sensitive? Often writing starts here as well, when you become self-aware. Do you take down notes on the go? Do you keep a notebook and change it only after you’ve filled it out entirely? Do you write down dialogues you hear as you commute? Do you keep a notepad of quotations?
Consult your journals, your letters, your diary, and even those back of receipts where you wrote down bullet points of wisdom. What is it that you always wrote about and why? How were you able to write in an unhurried pace or under a tense situation? Can you recall how you came up with one cohesive statement? Are you writing about personal desires using gut expressions? When you start writing, every process is a precious first note of how your text may eventually sing.
IN WRITING A FIRST DRAFT
You have reached a point when all that brainstormed ideas have narrowed into one united thought. Now is when you try to harmonize your concept by thinking about an audience. You need to ask at this stage, who will read what you have written and why? How will that reader not misunderstand? How will this writing resonate with that audience hearer?
Writing the first draft involves a hearer. There is always that ear of attention an author-originator will have to seduce through set, contemplative ways. That ear will hear because what the final draft is saying has aimed for it to listen. Deliberately, writing the final draft is a performance of careful attention to detail. The grammar, syntax and diction forming the major units of thoughts need exactness and fluency. Usually, the draft will, at this final form, exhibit the writing voice, or the style, or the angle, or beat. The final draft has made only one cohesive claim or perspective. Ambiguity is completely gone, and at least for that one target hearer and audience, a point has been made.
My website https://www.english-to-tagalog.com yielded only minimal passive income. The fault was entirely mine since I may claim to know how to write – even with SEO in mind, but I hardly wrote regularly. The ten-day tutorial for solopreneurs at Sitesell held all the secrets for success, however, I perused the masterful tips for the first two days only, but skipped the rest, preferring to ‘wing it’ when posting my blogs.
Embarrassing to admit that all that money spent on the website hosting just went down the drain. Had I invested it in stocks, I probably would have earned enough dividends by now; probably, since I also don’t know anything about stocks. Retirement is scary when there’s no secure source of financial support for the retiree. But I refuse to panic. Instead, I would like to go back to more gainful blogging.
You tube videos on the topic of SEO insist that blogging is still relevant today. With Artificial Intelligence, blogging for websites is a breeze. You only need to ask the best questions for this robot writer to feed you the content you need for your business website. There is that assurance that you can be smart as you make this technology your ally. But with this new tool comes more insecurities – at least for this sixty-year-old, who is trying hard to come up with a retirement plan, with writing as a business.
Who is my primary audience?
The first and most important task is establishing my intention for this blog. Who am I writing it for? All the experts say that I need to be passionate about something in order to sustain a blog. One podcast maintains that a niche may seem limited yet robots gathering and distributing insights have the whole world to serve and satisfy. There is no denying a blog’s unlimited reach, once it is directed at someone. The blogs must address the perceived needs of the target readers. The topics must exude authority and the writing style must project empathy.
How do I streamline my intentions for this blog?
Every Monday night, I challenge myself to blog about a senior moment. {This is Blog B in my category of tasks. Blog A is for book reviews, Blog C, for writing, editing, and translation.] Neil Gaiman in his masterclass says that honesty is what carries him through as a writer. Maybe some of the experiences will resonate with the target audience, maybe they won’t, but If I stay honest, I might not run out of issues to talk about.
What decisions in blogging should be finalized as soon as possible?
I have long learned that keyword searches are a crucial next step. But before searching for free apps that will give me statistics on what senior citizens are typing on Google search, I should decide on a Webhost. It’s possible to overdo the research, subscribing to every YouTube channel that enlightens me on this matter. However, a friend writer always told me, “You need to overcome your lack of an ego strength to put yourself out there.” Going public with personal issues may be easier said than done, but if I treat blogging as a workshop platform for my word crafting, I might become bolder and more confident. Immediately, I invested on a domain, created a free website, and blogged on.
This is just to say that this is still my page for the adventure of trying as much as I can to do what I can in the time that I have to write and write, so help me God. The ongoing project is the dissertation, in which I am supposed to present the proposal for this poetry collection on the third week of June, and as of now, I have not even gotten back to the draft. But I do write the poems, mostly on Sunday morning before I attend the 9:00 AM church service. (Yes, I go to Robinson’s Forum at 7 AM and scribble on my green- apple, spring notebook sitting behind one of those empty, round, white tables at the fast food corner on the third floor of FORUM, or I go to “country style” outside for the air condition.) But sometimes, I just revise what I’ve written the previous Sunday, so that the poems now number maybe 10 or 15 , with at least 5 in revision and the rest in their semi-confident final form. I have to get back at each poem’s structure/form though. I am discovering that lineation is one of my weaknesses, when I’m not doing poems in specific rhyme schemes.
I have also tried the following:
First, I submitted a proposal to URCO, and the research panel there said I should think about my research project more, so I can be specific and focused. Their question was: “What does she really want to do?”
What indeed? But I know what I want to do — a collection of poems/monologues of /or about some women in the Bible, those which the Bible is silent on. That is, sometimes, they don’t even have names in the biblical account, sometimes, they are catalysts for major events (the Levite’s concubine in Judges), sometimes, they are a case study of a certain suffering (Jeptha’s daughter in Judges). So their stories are merely mentioned. I wrote in the proposal that my creative work is going to be extra-biblical, meaning, that the monologues will be a product of my understanding of women’s psychology, and not of Bible exegesis. I am sure, though, that the panel is right in asking for the names of these women. What is certain is that they are not going to be about Bathsheba, or Ruth, or Sarah, or Hannah — the well known ones. But Peninah will be among them, the one Elkanah loved less in spite of her fertile womb. And that mother whose son David executed, and who was described as merely present there, watching her son die, wailing – she will be in the collection too. But the rest of them, I still have to find.
Second, I tried submitting poems to Likhaan Journal, and of course, I am not really confident about those poems. But what will I lose except the coveted byline?
Third, I’m still on BIANCA’s DIARY, for this is the major project in the perpetual works. But more and more, things about her character are getting blurry. What will happen to this kid? How am I going to proceed telling her tale? Shall I write one short story at a time as I conceive them, and then later turn them into chapters? This may be the best way to go considering that I am worst at plotting. Yet, as soon as I discover a situation (on Sunday afternoons during my brainstorming after the church service at around 12:00 PM onwards), I get overwhelmed by the immensity of the task of creation! Bianca has to evolve and here I am, still piecing her fragmented portrait in my mind. But there’s only one way to go — forward — with a struggle.
Maybe if I make this public then I will be more accountable. This Term leaves me with only Monday and Wednesday morning, with the Mondays more unflexible because the beginning of the week is always sluggish (here I go again, providing time allowances which I think I don’t need). But really, what happens on these vacant hours of teaching? Preparations for the next day’s lessons, is what happens. So this leaves me with only Friday, a day I should dedicate to writing, and Saturday, a day I should spend solely for research and finalization of my overdue dissertation proposal. Sunday is a time to meander and write poetry. I should have more Sunday places to go to (preferably inexpensive cafes), since home isn’t always the best place to write.
As for night time, I am usually tired; besides, the little child at home demands attention that this is also the only time to play with him and read him stories. Meanwhile, the early hours of the morning (possibly 3 to 6 AM) are usually the most profitable hours for online editing and proofreading jobs that usually come after midnight.
So this calendar could work.
Technically, following this disclosure, I should be working on my dissertation today instead of this blog. Yet the main reason I’m here now is that I wasted yesterday on a Filipino teen romance movie, by director Jadaone, and so I wasn’t able to write. (On second thought, I can say that I watched that movie for research, after all, I’m writing a YA novel — for and about teens…) Yesterday, a supposedly writing day, I commuted to a friend’s house because I was craving for sleep. I was thinking that since I could not sleep longer at home, that maybe, I could go to my friend’s place and sleep there — but she wasn’t there and I ended up on the road again, back in a mall, overspending on ice cream because it was too hot. By 7 PM, I was so tired of my useless adventure that I could not even play long with the toddler.
The reason for the lack of sleep is a TV series. For three consecutive nights now, I’ve been watching “When the Heart Calls” on Netflix. I really like this inspirational series, but this meant that for three days now, I have been sleeping at around 2AM, usually after watching at least three episodes. Of course, I’ve been waking up late and last night, I wasn’t able to answer calls for online jobs. So I’m here today, using the university library’s computer, to meet the deadlines I missed .
Of course, the question remaining is: when will I ever read? A regular time for reading should have a slot in this calendar. But now, I only have Sunday night left. Reading should be a worthwhile thing to do overnight before the busy weekdays. Hopefully, I can be focused on my reading fare and not waste any more hours.
