Sense, sensitivity and sensibility.

I am not sure if I will make sense, but I will attempt to do so.

For the past months, I have failed to put everything that has been happening into words. Writer's block, maybe. Or maybe I have not taken any time out to just push that pause button. My life has become an organized mess in the past months, and at times, many things just drove me up the wall. But maybe that is why life hands you lemons -- so that you can make the most out of it: lemonade, lemon curd, lemon meringue, lemon pie... and the list goes on.

Over the past week, I have been able to take time to finally push that pause button. Of course, this could have been because I spent at least two days of my life in transit, and that just allowed me to stop thinking about the many things that I have been preoccupied with. It allowed me some detachment from everything. Although I wanted to do some work while I was on the airplane, there was that voice inside me that just told me to let go.

I had to look back at the months that have passed and make sense of it.

I am no stranger to suffering, and this is something that I have had to deal with for most of my life. Sometimes, I get caught up in my own crosses that I forget that more people suffer more than I. And this is something many of us take for granted -- that if we were to measure our life against others, our sufferings would pale in comparison with others who have to eat it for breakfast and stare it at the face almost everyday of their lives. And this is where I began thinking, we have been talking about the impeachment of the Chief (In)justice of the Philippines, but is he really THE Chief Injustice?

This just slapped me right in the face. Over the past month, I have heard from many people how people have objectified the poor as recipients of charity and loose change, and it struck me when it came from a KB leader in Baseco. For many years and months, we say we are going to do something for the poor but the truth is we just did something  because it makes us feel good. And there are many who use the term "poverty" so loosely in academics. In my field alone, I could not count how many research have been published for the sake of being published that criticize existing policies. I do not even want to begin yapping about the readings I have had to do throughout the course of my studies in Masters.

And because the term has been used so loosely, some people have become indifferent about the issue. It has become a given to the point that we have lived with it. We have talked so extensively about what causes poverty that we have stopped when we found out why people were poor in the first place. And this, to me, is where injustices start -- when those who have been endowed so much can give so less than they could and  those who are at the bottom of the pyramid stay there because they have had to settle with what little we could give them.

I just felt a twinge in my heart when I began to realize how much we have let the poor down when we failed to genuinely looked into their concerns. Many times, I have become unjust to them myself because I looked at my own limits and settled for my limitations. In many ways, I have become part of a system that continues to pervade the problems that we try to respond to.

Just last week, I went to Toronto for five days. Yes, you've read it right. And in the midst of fighting the jet lag and attending the Summit, I realized how much work needs to be done. We cannot remain still. We cannot rely on theories to provide answers to our question. We will get left behind if the knowledge we continue to produce is the kind that is manufactured from a laptop and based on empirical data that we cannot make sense of by ourselves. The action is on the ground and real learning takes place there. And if we get stuck, we will never find answers. We will be laggard. We will not be excellent.

It's not too late. No, not at all. Epiphanies or breakthroughs exist for a reason. We have to make sense of what is going on in society so that we can awaken our sensitivities to the many problems that plague society and bring some sensibility to the patchwork of solutions that we develop.