Why can't I be a teacher?

 

Musings of a frustrated teacher

When I arrived in the province of Isabela on January 1992, letters and cards from Cebu kept stacking in my old shoebox. News from Cebu those times lifted my spirit high and somehow eased my homesickness. The snail mails stopped coming in by year 1998, maybe because in the advent of the internet and e-mails as latest vehicles of communication.

Tonight as I am groping for words and seek some inspiration, I grabbed Paulo Coelho’s books from the shelf and started reading. I read this book countless times already, yet The Alchemist still never failed to capture my interest to go on searching the meaning of life and the wisdom of the personal legend. Leafing through the pages, I knew by heart that this was and still be my favorite part of the book, to quote “To realize one’s Personal Legend is a person’s only real obligation. All things are one. And, when you want something, all the universe conspires in helping you to achieve it.” Then I put the book down and stopped reading because I remembered something. I started looking for my “mini treasures from Cebu”, and presto, I found these stacks of letters and cards carbon dated ’90s.

Yes, I still kept this 23 year-old letter from my college mentor, my adviser in our campus paper and a dean of instruction. This is one of the best letters I received from a man whom I admired most because of his integrity, a good example for the youth worthy to be emulated. I wonder whether other professors or a dean at that, would even bother to write letters to their former students. But he did, to me.

At first glance, this is just a simple letter relating some news, what’s going on the school, the school paper and those graduates who successfully pursued the right career path in the noble profession of teaching. The best part of the letter was his counsel to me to do good in my present job. That might sound pretty reassuring. But one thing bothered me that I asked myself – why can’t I be a teacher? Why can’t I be like them? What’s wrong with me that the whole universe seemed to never conspire in helping me out to achieve what I wanted to be. That question and similar wondering is still a mystery to me, even now.

Well, being a teacher is not my personal legend. Maybe or maybe not.