Salam

I write this as a personal attempt to bridge the gap of cultural misunderstanding and clashing worldviews. This is also a journey into self-discovery and understanding of the world I knew then and the one I am in now...

I’ve been trying to change my realities ever since I became aware that there is life outside the one I was brought up in. I’ve lived and moved from one place to another, from remote islands to cities of blinding lights, always crossing cultural boundaries – border to border, with every move fraught with struggle and culture shocks.

I have learned the hard way in shifting and changing the way I look at the world but it made me realized now that our cultural legacies matters a lot to our current situation. While it is true that the traditions we inherited from our parents matters, we are also the summation of advantages and disadvantages of the environment and community we grew up in, what our parents did for a living, how they raised us up and of course, the place where we were born.

I was born in an island which I have no memory of, except for the knowledge that such a place exists and can only be found if you searched the southernmost part of the Philippines map with the aid of a magnifying lens. My father was in the military, which meant that wherever his latest post took him, we moved with him there too. It was only after his death that I became fully aware that ‘the choice of where we live, affects how we live.’ It was only then, I resolved to defy the idea that was widely propagated and generally accepted when I was growing up: that where one was born, there he shall die also. But I can honestly say that death and settling to another place are the most unsettling experience in life. However, constant moving out entails us to move on also and moving does not or should not only change our locations but transforms us to become better persons.

Since birth – while it may be unknown to me at the time, I later on observed that I have been subjected to ‘an all-encompassing program of cultural conditioning’. This so-called program became my ‘spectacles’ or lens on how I should view the world – it became my worldview. I realized that we tend to view the world in much the same way our parents did. If they were influenced by their multi-generation of ancestors who were themselves subjected to certain ideologies on how one should conduct themselves and live their lives; there is a likelihood that the generation to which we belong to will also subscribe to those ideas. To this I can say that truly, ideas have consequences. If we extremely follow and succumb to those ideas, we may become self-righteous, intolerant, exclusivist and worse – impositional on others, just like the early colonizers. These ideas can infiltrate our lives in much the same way the colonizers did - it will work its way into our culture, our history and identity as a person and as a nation. Notice our names: we are named after the language of the colonizers in our history and we are even proud of it! This country is even named after a dead foreign king thus making the citizenry its perpetual subjects. Our ancestors were either Arabized or Islamized, others were Hispanized or Christianized, others still were Americanized, “Evangelicalized” or westernized.

With all these influences, how should we live our lives then? I will speak only for myself – I have decided that I must re-structure my life and ‘decolonize’ my brain as there is so much residue of colonialism left in it! I will let go of my comfort zones and adapt to new emerging realities because sometimes, it is only by loosening your grip to what you once held as ‘truth’ that you will begin to see life’s bigger picture.

Natural law dictates that every living creature was created with a capacity to adapt, to change, to reproduce and regenerate itself in the midst of changing conditions. In any ecosystem, only those species that are able to adapt to its changing environment are the only ones that can thrive and survive.

I am what I want to become because I have an inherent right to self-determination as a free man. If there are kindred spirits on the same path as me, I welcome you brother/sister to the perpetual tension of clashing worldviews. I may have a pragmatic outlook now, I find it logical that even before we became members of the universal Islamic community or Ummah, and long before we became members of the Body of Christ, we are all, first and foremost – brothers in humanity.

Peace!