Do I Have to Save the World?
Thankfully, no.
Save your breath first.
I am truly blessed with friends—a widow, her two sisters and their husbands, a niece and her two very young, lovely daughters, and a grandkid—who got so invested in ensuring I had a temporary home during a brief visit to my hometown, Iloilo City.
Let me name them: Maribel, Maide, Marilou, Enan and Piyok, Pearl Mycon, Summer, Ella, and Natalie. There!
They were quite a brood. They didn’t just find a place for me; they made sure I was settled in a decent little studio unit in the district of Jaro.
The ensuing pleasantries and laughter were nothing short of hilarious as soon as we reached the place. I guess that was to be expected. We hadn’t seen each other for quite some time.
A lot happened in between.
We all grew up in the same place. The only difference is, I was sort of exiled.
Every now and then, I get to go home—when my grandpa, grandma, uncles, my mom, and my Mamang passed away; and occasionally, when a high school class reunion beckons.
Not exactly the sort of homecoming one puts on a travel calendar.
But this time, I was there. And they were there.
So I saved my breath when they shared stories I needed to hear.
I saved my breath even more when we talked about their father and mother, both gone now, whom I adored.
And this is the part where I truly remembered—and cherished—how Tiya Alma and Tiyo Junior, the parents of Maribel, Maide and Marilou, saved not the world, but something perhaps just as difficult to save:
filial love among their twelve children.
I thought it was an amazing feat, especially amid the world we now live in, where respect, honor, integrity, and, above all, family bonds seem to be losing ground to that all-purpose excuse we call busyness.
We are busy earning.
Busy surviving.
Busy building lives somewhere else.
Busy answering messages while forgetting to answer people.
Busy chasing things that supposedly matter, until one day we look around and discover that some of the people who mattered most are no longer sitting at the table.
Tiya Alma and Tiyo Junior were not perfect people raising a perfect family. I don’t think such a family exists.
But somehow, they left behind children who still knew how to show up.
And there I was, witnessing it.
Years after their parents were gone, their children—and now their children’s children—were fussing over where an old friend would sleep. Who would find the place. Who would come along. Whether the room was decent. Whether I was comfortable. Whether everything was all right.
Such ordinary things.
And perhaps that is exactly the point.
Nobody saved the world that day.
Nobody ended hunger.
Nobody stopped a war.
Nobody solved poverty or fixed everything that is wrong with humanity.
They simply made sure one person had somewhere safe and decent to stay.
They laughed.
They remembered.
They showed up.
And suddenly, that seemed like a rather important way of saving something.
Perhaps we have made goodness unnecessarily enormous.
We think it must come with a project, a movement, a heroic sacrifice, or some grand declaration of purpose before it counts.
Maybe it doesn’t.
Maybe saving the world begins much closer to home.
With parents teaching twelve children that they belong to one another.
With grown children remembering what their parents taught them.
With grandchildren absorbing the lesson without anyone sitting them down to explain it.
With friends making room for someone who wandered away long ago and happened to wander home again.
So, no.
I don’t have to save the world.
Neither do you.
There are days when the world is simply too big to carry.
Save your breath first.
Then use some of it to ask someone how they are.
Sit around a table a little longer.
Listen to an old story you’ve already heard.
Remember the people who are gone.
Make room for someone coming home.
Show up.
Because perhaps the world isn’t saved all at once.
Perhaps it is saved in very small pieces, by people who refuse to become too busy to care.
And for one brief evening in Jaro, surrounded by laughter, old stories, and the descendants of Tiya Alma and Tiyo Junior, I think I saw one of those little pieces still wonderfully intact.
I didn’t have to save it.
They already had.
Featured Image: The Malaca clan — impossible to gather in one photo, but always perfectly gathered in spirit.
