Grow
The following is an excerpt (albeit revised) of a speech I gave during the Academic Conference held by the University of British Columbia Filipino Students Association (UBC-FSA).
You are starting the rest of your life. It’s wonderful, but you are probably thinking you are not allowed to make a mistake in choosing your path. It is, after all, expensive.
But please know that loneliness and dissatisfaction are more expensive, not to mention damaging. So what I want to tell you is that we are given many chances, and allowed many starts. We can – in fact – be anything and everything we want. Our paths are not straight but meandering, allowing for that detour which would make us realize our fullest potentials. There may be in fact not just one path, but many paths, and many different sort of happiness and fulfillment.
To show you the truth of that, let me tell you about the stories of many Filipinos here in Canada.