It was dusk; tired from work, I was waiting for a ride home. She passed by like a mysterious constellation that glitters from the southern skies. Honest eyes and sincere smile, an image worthy in a place of worship. I look around, curious if to whom such priceless smile was given. I was standing alone. Then she spoke, an honest concern in her timid voice, gentle as the fine drizzle that kept me in shelter for several minutes. It was a lovely memory to bring home.

 

 

            All is nothing but a game. With whom shall I play my bet? Each has own rules to follow. With whom shall I bend my rules and play along with hers instead? Will the stake be worth the risk?

           

         
          The biting chill of the morning breeze, caressed away by the warmth of the rising sun. He savors the feeling of being suspended between the comfort of warmth and cold, odd but almost pleasurable. Just like the feeling of warmth and cold, a storm of emotion is building within, warming the heart but chilled by the confusion and doubts in the mind. As placid as this September morning he remains calm, occasionally disturbed alternately by a long sigh and unconscious smile.

            Einstein said that if your heart tells you one thing and your head tells you another, before you do anything decide first whether you have a better heart or a better head.

           

            I started an essay entitled “The Fury of Tigum”, reliving the horrific scenes I witnessed and tales told during the notorious siege of typhoon Frank in our community. But I decided not to go on writing about it, because I realized that the tragedy is not worth remembering after all. Lessons learned, yes, but it is a waste of time to focus on things we cannot change. Mr. Covey stressed that we should focus on our circle of influence and not on our circle of concern. The power supply is back after a week but the water supply has a slim chance of coming back in two months time. Transportation is a hassle with two bridges down, leaving our town virtually isolated. Bamboo rafts to cross the river, I hate you Frankie!

            Given the current scenario, I’m not in a good psychological mood to review for the upcoming exams. Writing about management theories I think would help in remembering some concepts and their practicability. I commit all Saturdays and Sundays of July for overtime, so I virtually have no rest for the month. With the exam coming in less than 2 months, am I making the right decisions? Arrrgh!

            Talking about work, I am reminded of Douglas McGregor’s Theory X and Theory Y in his article The Human Side of Enterprise.

            The conventional theory of managing is stated in the set of propositions called “Theory X”:

1. Management is responsible for organizing the elements of productive enterprise – money, materials, equipment, people – in the interest of economic ends.
2. With respect to people, this a process of directing their efforts, motivating them, controlling their actions, modifying their behavior to fit the needs of the organization.
3. Without this active intervention by management, people would be passive – even resistant – to organizational needs, they must therefore be persuaded, rewarded, punished, controlled – their activities must be directed. This is management’s task. We often sum it up by saying that management consists of getting things done through other people.
4. The average man is by nature indolent – he works as little as possible.
5. He lacks ambition, dislikes responsibility, prefers to be led.
6. He is inherently self-centered, indifferent to organizational needs.
7. He is by nature resistant to change.
8. He is gullible, not very bright, the ready dupe of the charlatan and the demagogue.

Is the conventional view correct? According to Douglas McGregor, perhaps the best way to indicate why the conventional approach of management is inadequate is to consider the subject of motivation. Man is a wanting animal – as soon as one of his needs is satisfied another appears in its place and the process is unending. It continues from birth to death. As theorized by Maslow, man’s needs are organized in a series of levels – a hierarchy of importance from the lowest level of his physiological needs followed by safety needs, social needs, ego needs and finally the self-fulfillment needs.

The man whose lower level needs are satisfied is not motivated to satisfy those needs any longer. For practical purposes they exist no longer. Management often asks, “Why aren’t people more productive? We pay good wages, provide good working conditions, have excellent fringe benefits and steady employment. Yet people do not seem to be willing to put forth more than minimum effort.”

The fact that management has provided for these physiological and safety needs has shifted the motivational emphasis to the social and perhaps to the egoistic needs. Unless there are opportunities at work to satisfy these higher level needs, people will be deprived; and their behavior will reflect this deprivation. (Hmmmm… would this explain the behavior of the (regular) workers in some government agencies?). Under such conditions, if management continues to focus its attention on physiological needs, its efforts are bound to be ineffective.

People will make insistent demands for more money under these conditions. It becomes more important than ever to buy the material goods and services which can provide limited satisfaction of the thwarted needs. (Baw a, daw insakto gid and ginapangwakal ni McGregor sa makita ta sa palibot-libot). Although money has only limited value in satisfying many higher level needs, it can become the focus of interest if it is the only means available. (Bonuses? Galaway-laway takon e, wehehhe).

But what really interesting is this carrot-and-stick theory of motivation. It really works reasonably well under circumstances. Listen to this contractors, contractuals, or temporary employees! The means for satisfying man’s physiological and (within limits) his safety needs can be provided or withheld by management. Employment itself is such means, and so are wages, working conditions, and benefits. By these means the individual can be controlled as long as he is struggling for subsistence.

A new theory of the task of managing people based on more adequate assumptions about human nature and human motivation is suggested by McGregor. He calls it “Theory Y”:

1.      Management is responsible for organizing the elements of productive enterprise – money, materials, equipments, people – in the interest of economic ends.

2.      People are not by nature passive or resistant to organizational needs. They have become so as a result of experience in organizations.

3.      The motivation, the potential for development, the capacity for assuming responsibility, the readiness to direct behavior toward organizational goals are all present in people. Management does not put them there. It is a responsibility of management to make it possible for people to recognize and develop these human characteristics for themselves.

4.      The essential task of management is to arrange the organizational conditions and methods of operation so that all people can achieve their own goals best by directing their own efforts toward organizational objectives.

I could not easily classify the agency I’m “familiar with” whether it belongs to a theory X or theory Y category. In some ways, it is a Y and in other ways an extreme X Clearly though, it is a psychic prison, the sixth of Morgan’s metaphor. (It is only my exaggerated opinion).

According to Morgan’s culture metaphor, organization is an enactment of shared reality, organizations are socially constructed realities, and it is culture that shapes the character of the organization. (Hope that another soul understands this, I had nosebleed when I first come across with Morgan’s 7 metaphors.). We cannot blame then the Theory X supervisor if he threatens you just to carry out the department’s goals? (Uhmmmm… bahala na ang karma, hi Frankie).

McGregor added that people are accustomed to being directed, manipulated, controlled in organizations and to finding satisfaction for their social, egoistic, and self-fulfillment needs away from the job. This is true of much of management as well as of workers.

           I made a self-assessment test for myself. I am between theory X and theory Y. Maybe that explains why when a girl told me to… I….and sometimes…, hahaha.

            Physics of unrequited love, huh?

               The Saturday classes are over; another chapter that is two years in the making is closed. But the measure of how much knowledge was grasped after two years of exciting and epic exodus is yet to come. Well, we had not crossed the Red Sea or whatever, but we almost expired to the point of drowning with avalanche of case studies and papers. Now I wonder what if God had tasked Moses to do a strategic plan for their escape from Egypt, would he use David’s framework and would he bother to conduct a SWOT analysis? Would the seven plagues still be part of his short-term objectives? Would the rain of manna from heaven be part of his external or internal audit? Would the Local Government Code of 1991 be applicable to the promise land? What innovations they had to formulate to make it even more promising? If you try to answer my seemingly sensible questions, how many chapters do you think the Old Testament would hold?

I can only imagine myself like a manga (Japanese animation/comics) character with drooling saliva while faced with mountain of notes and books to read. If I can only be a manga character (my apologies Stephen Covey, this might not sound as proactive as your seven habits), then I can almost do anything imaginable and imaginable (including naughty stuffs that are not found in the childish world of Narnia and Harry Potter).

Did I mention my good buddy Stephen Covey? He taught me about paradigm shift. Assuming that I am intellectually capacitated enough to explain, the word paradigm comes from the Greek. It was originally a scientific term, and is more commonly used today to mean a model, theory, perception, assumption, or frame of reference. In the more general sense, it’s the way we "see" the world — not in terms of our visual sense of sight, but in terms of perceiving, understanding, and interpreting. Writing this kind of nonsensical blog entry is a shift from my emotionally draining melodramas. But of course, I cannot do away with that “pouring of emotion” through words or I might end up like a deranged prisoner of Azkaban haunted by dementors. Dementors arouse the deepest fear and feed on them. And so the wizards in Harry Potter devised chant and spell to combat those deathly creatures: “expecto petronas!” Read on the following lecture of Stephen Covey on stimulus and response:

The ability to subordinate an impulse to a value is the essence of the proactive person. Reactive people are driven by feelings, by circumstances, by conditions, by their environment. Proactive people are driven by values — carefully thought about, selected and internalized values.

Proactive people are still influenced by external stimuli, whether physical, social, or psychological. But their response to the stimuli, conscious or unconscious, is a value-based choice or response.

As Eleanor Roosevelt observed, "No one can hurt you without your consent." In the words of Gandhi, "They cannot take away our self respect if we do not give it to them." It is our willing permission, our consent to what happens to us, that hurts us far more than what happens to us in the first place.

If the professors of Hogwarts happened to attend this lecture, would you think they would bother to teach the young wizards how to use their wand to protect themselves from dementors or they would simply train them how to be proactive?

One example of proactive character is the Kungfu Panda, the animated movie released by DreamWorks, which theme song is sang by the Filipino teen Sam Concepcion, whose name I failed to see on the list of original credits at the end. According to the movie, there is no secret ingredient to become special. Something becomes special only if you believe it to be special. So where’s the proactive part? Watch the movie yourself and decide. I’m not good in explaining things… my mind is blurred by the the historical details of the book I’m reading, the League of Night and Fog, call that the literal title effect or whatever. Anyway, I set it aside for The Chariots of Calyx, curious why someone gave this book to me with dedication that says, “…mysterious and as intriguing as you are.” I was flattered. Teary eyed. Cared for…

But hey! Me? Intriguing and mysterious? Oh, come on!

                 The dying glow of the western horizon, as the warmth of the daylight slowly drowns in the breath of a gentle zephyr, brings life to what is hidden deep from within. The bridge where he stands transforms into another world, a dimension where he is suspended in an infinite space, silently flowing along the meandering path of Tigum river. Like the water that eternally springs from distant mountains, so his soul sips life from darkness. Who needs the light when you can feel each corners and turns of the journey, with the pain so real like a knife stabbed at the very heart? He roars in laughter, no one hears…he is free.

                              A familiar voice, he thought he was just imagining hearing, hesitantly calling him, with the distinct way she speaks the “i” and “e” combination in the last syllable of his name. Curious, he scanned the faces of strangers around him…

Indeed, “defining” moments in life come unexpectedly.

              Five years.

She’s no longer a girl, but a childish mien remains when she frowns and smiles.

Awkward moments.

Just like the wave that kisses the shore and silently dies, you came and asserted your self and silently walked away. But as infinite as the waves that touch the shore, so will be my reminiscence of you…

Like ordinary friends that have never seen each other for so long, they talked. She’s spontaneous, he is as always, calculated. There are topics that are avoided (at least on his part), until she stressed a point (that he might not want her hair cut short) and added:

“I know you…”

That phrase came out with different meanings that instantly brought some realizations. He was speechless for a moment. It could be because of guilt or something else.

Smiling, she continued…

“Ikaw abi…”

He deserves the blame. She added:

“I’m sorry, I got fault in my part…”

Silence. And finally she said:

“Thank you for everything.”

Silence.

The last three phrases struck him head-on. It stirred emotions that haunted him up to his sleep. Could the feeling denied for five years remain and lay dormant and wake up in thirst and hunger?

But it’s too late now…

Every songs of heartache are tuned with different meaning, magnifying the hollowness, summoning a tear. Every love song of happy endings sounds like a mockery, an insult, an invitation for self-pity. The world seemed to turn its back when each of the FM stations signed off late at night.

He thought he was immune.

He was wrong.

         Should reality always be felt by the senses, proven by pain? Is that why we sometimes ask to be slapped just to prove if we are not just dreaming?

         He got more than just a slap. No escape. Trapped in the cage of his isolation.

          Ironically, he used to tease a friend with the song One Last Cry, but now he finds consolation with the lyrics:

                              “…one last cry, before I leave it all behind,

I got to put you out of my mind, this time…

I guess I’m down to my last cry…”

                               Thank you and goodbye Spanish eyes.

                       I don’t know why summer sometimes puts me in a melodramatic mood (inagi na naman gwaps?hehe). My mother even noticed it (seems that she notices everything though) when she caught me with jaws dropped and staring blankly in space (well, that’s how she described it). A breathing exercise suggested by an article written in a past issue of a national tabloid failed to brush away the stress.

            So last night, instead of listening to mellow songs like Rainy Days and Mondays by Carpenters and One Last Cry by Bryan McKnight to put me in the mood to sleep(wehehe), I took a pen and scribbled a poem and played The Prayer.

That felt good.

Summer Dust

(The Memory of my 26^th Summer)

by Arniel Pescuela Malaga

April 8, 2008, 11:45 PM

Holding the rein and riding the vagabond wind

Trailing a rusty road in a thirsty terrain

Swaying, swaying, with the muted song it sings,

Is it a melody of joy or a silent echo of pain?

Flowing languorously in a dry current

Leaves wilted, time passes without a hint

Soaring, soaring, to the heights of walls

Will a fragile soul not hurt in a gentle fall?

Rushing with the outburst of a leading gale

Clouds twirling, screaming in a voice so shrill

Sailing, sailing with the storm of the past

Will the next valley promise a calm that shall last?

Floating in the dark seas of the night

A crystal dust, void of luster without the light

Sleeping, sleeping, with the lullaby of a stream

Will rest be found in a peaceful dream?

With years added to our days, and with more experience of life, we’ve found out that it’s not too unusual to find that the full meaning of a particular event or situation that happened some time in the past, was not always fully appreciated or even realized at the time in which that specific episode happened. Instead, on a few occasions when we sit back to recall and further analyze some of those memories, the true content and value of that moment can sometimes resurface, at last enabling us to truly recapture that moment and finally fully appreciate it for it’s original worth. (SteveP)

            With hindsight in contemplating on those memories, one could understand  and fully realize those instances in a much more complete and fulfilling way. Those memories then become not just a faded, black and white memory boxed in the deep trenches of our minds but much more like a meaningful, crisp colored experiences that they really were and should have appreciated to be. Those real life motion pictures to be savored and replayed in slow motion over and over again in the virtual theater of one’s conscious mind.

March 1, 2008 - Palaca, Miag-ao    

Dusk came silently as it pushes the last glint of sunset in the back pocket of western mountains, enveloping the shoreline in thickening darkness. In the absence of light, gentle waves tirelessly played with the sand echoing a splash of delighted laughter as coconuts stood like silhouetted giants slumbering for the night. In the midst of darkness, we seated on the sand watching the line of lanterns of countless fishing boats dittoing the different brightness emitted by the stars in Orion’s belt above in the night’s cloudless northern sky.

We’d been there a year ago. I can clearly recall the instances of the last year’s episode, more vivid than photographs taken. A year passed, and I witnessed the same sunrise with different group of friends, as different waves might have greeted us in the shore. Yes, it took one year to experience again the second sunrise in Palaca, and a lot had happened in the span of the two sunrises.

The ocean is ancient, and so the sand, but the sunrise would always be  new and warm in Palaca.

Just like the friends we met along the way… like lanterns in the ocean’s midnight horizon, perpetually I will keep a strand of their warm glow in my heart.

Graduate school is coming to end. Sobs.