The Rat Race? I Don't Think So.

I recently ran into an old high school friend of mine along the walkways of IT Park, Cebu while going through the motions of ending another routine study day. We didn't expect to see each other but, meetings with old friends are always nice surprises.

So we took seats outside, a local fastfood chain while I waited for my wife's chicken jambalaya and she was waiting for her work shift to start. She had just moved to Cebu and was starting a new job there after leaving her former work in Dumaguete City with her husband. It was all about advancement and such and how it hadn't provided enough growth for her and her family.

We counted that it was fourteen years since high school ended and all of our ways had to part. We shared most of what were small disappointments and mostly happy memories.

But we all had to go -- grow up, choose careers, go to college, get jobs, live.

She has been happily married for eight years, with one son. She shared that in conversations with her husband, she found it tedious to have had to start again in a new career, when at 30 they were supposed to be slowing down and enjoying the fruits of their labors and seeing their kids grow up.

I smiled, nodded, not really in agreement but mostly sympathetic and supportive.

30? Slowing down and retiring? Hmm. No.

It must be a new age thing.

I've been married, as of this writing, 1 year and almost 2 months. Kids? God-willing in the near future. Job? Physician, and just starting out, including the prospects of getting fellowships. Travel? A few places, here and there. Car? Whatever my family loans me, for now.

Happy? Definitely.

I've maintained the stand, all this time, that this life isn't a race. I've politely smiled to everybody that has remarked and commented that I'm getting too old to enjoy and see what my kids will be doing when they enter high school themselves. I know some people mean it encouragingly, when they say start a family now, build a house, because all the people around you are, but hey, which begs the questions why and why not?

Happiness is relative. So just as politely as I nod and keep silent my disagreement and project my support, do the same.

Its happiness when I see that the woman who wakes me up in the middle of the night for me to drive her to the hospital for an emergency C-Section, is the same woman who I want to wake up every Sunday morning with for the rest of my life, and hopefully, with kids knocking on the door saying it's time for church already.

Its elation when you have a job that allows you the challenge of figuring out what ails a person and actually have that same person thank you when he leaves your clinic, and I intend to do it until the day I no longer exist.

Its satisfaction when you just take time to smell the roses, be able to sit in your own little corner of the world and drink a large caramel coffee ice-blended frappuccino while rattling away emotions on some obscure blog.

Just enjoying walking slowly in the race of life.