AS GRADUATION speaker before the 646 senior high school graduates (first batch) of the Central Philippine University, Dr. Earl Jude Paul L. Cleope – Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences of Silliman University – asked, “Where will you go from here?”
He quoted a few lines from Robert Frost’s poem “The Road Not Taken” which states, “Two roads diverged in a wood, and I took the one less travelled by, and that has made all the difference.”
“Be daring,” Cleope challenged his audience, “Have faith. Try to follow the road less travelled. Do not follow the crowd. Follow your heart because in the end those who decide to be daring and courageous are the people who make the difference in their community.”
Those final words of the speaker reminded me of my late father during my own high school graduation in 1966. He advised me to take up Veterinary Medicine in college.
“We have few veterinarians in the Philippines,” he stressed. “You would easily find a high-paying position in government.”
To my dad, it was a road less travelled. I tried to obey him by enrolling as a freshman Vet-Med student at the University of the Philippines. But when he sensed my heart was not in it, and knowing I had been news editor of our high school paper, he allowed me to shift to Journalism at the Manuel L. Quezon University in Manila.
Looking back, I wonder whether I could have become a rich veterinarian owning an animal hospital. My long experience as journalist, on the other hand, has not been so materially rewarding but has filled me with self-fulfilment. Only a few make good as pen pushers. I have practiced my profession and that has made the difference.
Had I taken any other course, I might have become a proverbial “square peg in a round hole.”
There was a time when Professor Ian Espada of the West Visayas State University sent three of his Mass Communications students to interview me for their term paper.
One of them asked, “Do you consider yourself a successful journalist?”
“Yes,” I answered. “Journalism has always been my passion. I still practice the profession. I am happy where I am, looking forward to write for a living till the end of my time. No retirement.”
I asked my “interviewers” whether they were also interested in newspaper work. I was candid in telling them that if they had not done well as English writers in the elementary and high schools, four more years in college could go to waste.
“Most of my classmates in Journalism could not write in good English,” I confessed. “They passed the course but never made a livelihood out of it. But that’s not really bad news because some of them found higher-paying jobs in other fields. Less fortunate were those who opted for an MD – marriage degree – before landing on a stable job.”
I reminded my interviewers about an inspirational nugget about two men walking on the road. One had an expensive stainless flashlight; the other, a cheap, plastic-encased flashlight. When the night fell, the two switched their flashlights on. The expensive flashlight failed to light up while the cheap one shone brightly. As to which was the successful flashlight, the answer is obvious.
I linked the light to a Bible verse (John 12:36) where Jesus tells his flock, “Put your trust in the light while there is still time.” (hvego31@gmail.com/PN)
