HUMMING IN MY UNIVERSE By Jim Paredes (The Philippine Star) | Updated February 15, 2015 – 12:00am

Since it was Valentine’s day yesterday, I wish to share with you my thoughts about love and a few other things. Without the promise of chocolates, roses, an expensive dinner, a concert and the possible prospect of an exchange of bodily fluids after, I hope I can get you to read on.

I believe in love. I believe in creativity. I believe in abundance.

I believe in all three because I think that, deep down, they are all the same.

In my creativity class, I tell my students that whatever creative endeavor you do, it involves expanding yourself. You show up and explore and say yes to something unknown to you. You must risk. You must pay attention. You must learn what works and what doesn’t. You must also discover that creativity coming from the most truthful part of you will bring out your most beautiful creations. And at the end of every creative act, you feel that you have become a bigger person.
Let’s take a look at love. Love is about extending yourself to another.

You also show up and spend time with the person. You also open yourself and become vulnerable. You also give freely. You also take risks. You may even get hurt bad, but no matter. You just do it.

You both explore the world of feelings — your own and the one you love. You offer everything you have — your time, resources, emotions, even your bodies to each other until the feeling of individual separateness vanishes and there is only one of “you.” You end bigger than who you were before you loved.

Sure, you may get hurt and feel broken, but trust me, as you move on, you will reach a point where you will be thankful for the love you gave and received. Abundance is a wonderful feeling. No, it is not based on how much you earn, or the riches you have accumulated. It is far bigger than that. A person rich in assets and money may feel poor when his net assets get smaller. He may feel poverty creeping in and be unhappy even while enjoying the luxuries that his lifestyle offers. On the other hand, a
man with hardly any assets can feel an overflowing abundance. Small things like the extra money saved, or an unexpected small windfall like buying something at a bargain price can brighten up his day.

The truth is, you can give the richest man in the world a million dollars and it would hardly change the way he feels. Give a poor man P10,000 and he will be ecstatic.

What is evident here is this: the feeling of abundance has nothing to do with money. It has nothing to do too with one’s socio-economic status. Abundance comes from the feeling of gratitude you feel just by being alive.

If you want to feel rich and abundant, the secret is to learn gratitude. To learn gratitude, you must awaken to it. And it is a spiritual awakening that must happen to see in full view God’s gifts everywhere. To do that, you must learn to overcome fear and show up for your own life, and pay attention and expand your understanding. When you do that, you will feel so lucky and abundantly blest every moment of your life. We are all born creative. I know some people may doubt hat. They look around and see really creative people and feel that they are nowhere close to being like them. I can understand that. But please read on.

I repeat that every single human being is born creative and has something to contribute. But somewhere along the way into becoming adults, many of us acquired blockages that made us doubt our innate creativity, our capacity to love and create and feel abundance. Our parents, schools, societal mores, people, institutions and even our religions may have done it inadvertently in the name of raising us “properly.” They boxed us in, “straightened” us out with fear to make us ready for “real life.” While it may have done us some good and serves us to a point, it also limits us since we also learned to fear, sometimes irrationally, to doubt ourselves, and to always choose to be on the “safe” side.

The mission for each one of us is to overcome these blocks that prevent us from being who we were meant to be. The job of becoming an adult is to reach our full potential. In short, we must overcome our blocks and fears to be able to love, create and to live our life in abundance.

It is a life-long mission. We never stop growing because there is no end to our capacity to experience love, creativity and abundance.

We were born to love and yes, we will never stop loving till we die. We may feel heartbroken but we are still in some form of love state.

I talk about love here in its many forms like love of parents, siblings, partners, humanity in general. There is also the love of one’s country, nature, God, and life itself. Love is a limitless resource and love awakens love. It begets it. No act of love gets wasted. And it multiplies when cared for properly.

“It is an absolute human certainty that no one can know his own beauty or perceive a sense of his own worth until it has been reflected back to him in the mirror of another loving, caring human being,” said the American author John Joseph Powell.

To awaken the love inside oneself and to share it with others is life’s true meaning. Why else do we do what we do if not to attract more love and to give it away? Think about it. This Valentine, may you experience love in its most creative manifestations and in great abundance. And may you pass it on to everyone you meet. It’s the thing that the world needs.