Holiday Cheers

What matters to an artist is not experience, but inward experience
- Cesare Pavese

I tried to get out of bed Monday morning but neither my heavy head nor semi-paralyzed limbs allowed me to. Instead, the warmth of the sun that beamed through the window beside my bed forced me to get up and slowly walk to the bathroom.
As I was eating breakfast I could feel my calf muscles ache. It felt like I was still standing singing Filipino Christmas Carols to mall goers – songs like, “O, Magsaya” (the Filipino translation of “Joy to the World”).
It was Saturday when we went to this mall in Alabang, not to shop for Christmas gifts but, together with our suit bags, place ourselves to designated stations in the mall where we would be singing. We dressed up in our priced barong and the ladies in their balintawak, walked to one of the stations, formed two lines and sang with bright faces to passersby. With every song there would be a few people listening and some would simply ignore our singing.
We would sing the same repertoire in each station and in each station I would see people smiling and singing along. Less the sore feet, it was fun seeing the eyes of the people around you brighten as they heard our harmonious voices.
For collectively almost 5 hours (we had breaks in between stations), for two days we sang in the mall and I experienced the physical exhaustion only that Monday morning. And yet I never regretted going to the mall and singing for the people. Until now I can still feel that unexplainable joy I felt; it was greater than the joy I felt when I first learned to whistle a tune.
After breakfast I rode a bus to Quezon City. I would be going to a condominium unit to paint a mural of Peter Pan and Tinkerbell for two kids’ age 5 and 7. I would be again filled with happiness knowing that when the painting would be done they too will smile and the cycle would go on and on.