TIME FLIES
It's already July. I sense that people where I live are doing good, considering the difficult situation. Businesses are starting to open and public transportation is available.
I met a friend at a grocery store and we talked for a few minutes before she went to get her internet connection fixed. She was on a work-from-home arrangement and had three online meetings lined up but their internet has been down for three days already which is a bummer. This has been the common theme I hear from friends and even the news channels; internet connection, or how poor and shabby connections will play a growing role in how we will live our lives moving forward.
MY LOVE
I love my coffee, but like everyone else, I do get bored of drinking it and prefer to gulp on something else from time to time. And, as I am also a firm believer in the idiom that too much of anything is bad for you, I decided to shake things up a little and looked at the options available in the grocery store since I was going there and it was time for me to drink something 'healthier'.
I found a box of Sambong Herbal Tea in one corner of the shelves and chose to get it as my 'back-up' to coffee. We had a sambong plant outside our house in Laguna when I was young, which was often used as first aid to treat wounds and cuts the children would get playing outside.
It is a fairly common plant in the Philippines and has been endorsed by the Department of Health to treat diarrhea, rheumatism, kidney stones, coughs and colds and hypertension.
This sambong tea is not the best tasting tea I’ve had, but it's a wonderful local tea and good #naturalmedicine; and, since I take it without honey or sugar, don't take my word for it. Try it out for yourself. I would say a three-out-of-five, if I had to give it a rating for taste, flavor and general niceness to drink. :)
Is a dash (–) important?
We use the dash to separate parts of a sentence. I love using it because it fits right in to my style of writing, which I would describe as laid-back and informal. I try to write as if I am speaking in front of the reader, or readers, and we are just having a conversation among friends, which is quite interesting to me because communication is defined as an 'exchange of information'– feedback. This is not to say that there wasn't any feedback when I don't get any response from readers, but maybe that my writing was uninteresting or does not require a response from them. To my point, punctuation marks makes writing more exciting and should be used more often to break the monotony of sentences.
Going back to the dash, the dictionary defines is as:
‘to go somewhere quickly’, ‘to hit something with great force, especially causing damage’, ‘a race over a short distance’,’ a small amount of something added to or mixed with something else’.
In grammar, a dash may be used like a comma or semi-colon. It is also the punctuation mark used to separate a person’s date of birth and death, which is the point I was trying to awkwardly get at. LOL.
Everyone who comes into the world already has a starting date - our birthday. We celebrate it every year, receive gifts, party with family and friends and just have a good time.
At the other end of the stick, our ending has already been determined and all of us, without exception, will ultimately write the end date - our expiration. Our life may reach the century mark or be just a few days on earth. Nobody knows. It is almost taboo to talk about it in everyday conversation, except for funerals or maybe doctors discussing work, but this is one of the things that led to the enlightenment of Gautama Buddha.
The #coronavirus pandemic turned our lives upside down that we are now talking about a ‘new normal’. Death rates are skyrocketing! COVID-19 deaths have breached the half a million mark and we still do not have a vaccine. It is an unprecedented event in history and one that grandparents are saying they’ve never seen anything like it before. With millions of people infected and thousands of active cases, the ‘new normal’ will also be something we’ve never seen before.
TO CONCLUDE
We are now discussing things we've never thought of as important before the pandemic. Sanitation, physical distancing, strengthening the immune system have taken on new meaning. Common people and the news channels have taken an interest in statistics, which I never thought I'd see in my lifetime. But this is the new normal, and just maybe, we can also think what it is about death that led the Buddha to become enlightened.
In the end, on my tombstone over my grave, people will read when I was born and the date when I died. The dash will be of equal, or more importance, because to me it represents how I lived my life.
There’s a lot to be grateful for even in these trying times. Personally, I’m thankful that my family and I are healthy and alive. We are fortunate that we have enough to be able to eat a decent meal every day and live a modest life with a roof over our heads.
Thanks for dropping by and reading up to here. Good day and blessings to everyone! :)
