RUBIK’S: AS COMPLICATED AS LIFE ITSELF

Way back when I was just a wandering kid, learning to tie my shoe and welcoming the breeze of life unto my little nostrils, I wonder what was Rubik’s Cube for? It was so grotesque for me, I mean for me it’s more than just a toy (because of it’s symbolism. I guess you really have to read further) I was so awed by it’s multi-rotary sides and perfectly engineered mechanism. A cube within a cube. A handfuls of cube each moving in a perfect mechanical route. Consequently, a single color dangles miles and miles of moves while you don’t know the techniques yet. Thus, if you wanna see your cube still arranged correctly, then careful in twisting it the first time you bought it, else that’s the first and the last time you’ll gonna see it that way (except if you excuse me putting them back, lol!).

I bought one vended at the side-walk. With affordable price(I guess it’s 20 pesos) comes affordable quality. After a day of use the colors become unison white! Wow, before, I pound my head how to put  respective colors back to it’s respective sides, now it’s the other way around, since it’s all white! Well, just a simple thought. If you can, buy the original. Anyway, as I am writing this stuff I have my new original one beside me (as my coach, lol).

The thrill of learning makes me see things far yet so near. That I could ever come to the point where I can really assemble the cube again despite it’s complexity. I put it this way. It’s 99% perspiration and 1% inspiration. It’s 99% of my effort and patience have been tried on the table and 1% of it from the World Wide Web where I get the necessary thought to do it. I’d like to clap my hands to this groundbreaking human brainchild, the Internet.

Hmmm, learning the cube is not a joke, as it is not a joke really when you’ll get frustrated after a little consolation of completing one side and then losing it again for the sake of the other. I’ll tell you, your head turns with the cube, ha ha ha! as what your set mate might have told you once.

The primary and simple colors you see(white, orange, blue, yellow, green and red) can never be mistaken to its complex assembly. These simple colors forebode great puzzle wonders  that you’ll ever met in this world (no doubt it’s one of the best puzzle and puzzle game in the toy kingdom). The cube offers one of the most difficult puzzle in the world, paralleled to that of the Bermuda and other daunting phenomena in this world. I guess, the only difference is that, Bermuda is still manifesting it’s puzzling activities, while the cube has long been recreated to manifest more puzzling turnouts. Anyway, it took me some kind of a week or two to learn and master the cube (of course I did eat my meals, took a bath, go to work, brush my teeth, go to sleep and forget about it, it’s not so engrossing after all, besides that it’s fun and annoying sometimes).

Nonetheless, there is only one thing I could admit and realize, Rubik’s cube offers the same dilemma and complexity as life itself offers. The cube offers so much headache if you wanna go into a solo.  It offers teasing puzzles. It offers bright and vexing color combinations. But not much. Take this: a standard and default Rubik’s cube which is 3×3x3, offers you 43, 252, 003, 274, 489, 859, 000 possible configurations. I don’t know how did it come that way. Well, that’s what authority said. As for me, huh, I don’t know about that, that’s Math you know!?

It offers multifarious moves and combinations. All is corollary and mutually dedicated to a single purpose – to solve the cube. Each single move out of that color combinations plays a big part in solving the cube.

So, what do you think in your life as well as mine? If you have a problem, isn’t it so easy as eating an apple pie if you were given those possible combinations to solve your problem? And yet life is more than just a hefty turn and twist of a cube. I’m quite sure life offers more “possible configurations” than the cube itself.

Yeah, life is hard, the craziest man on earth would not admit that! But the way life offers daredevil puzzles and atrocities, is the same way life offers possible solutions to them – we really just have to know the techniques.

FAMILY AND SECULARIZATION

(Familiaris Consortio of the late Pope John Paul II emphasizes on family growth and development amidst material booming in our society. I tried once to project my thought on this, I just don’t know if it will get you.)

 

Each family finds within itself summons that cannot be ignored, and that specifies both dignity and its responsibility: family, becomes what you are looking at it in such a way as to reach its very roots, we must say that the essence and role of the family are in the final analysis specified by love. Hence the family has the mission to guard, reveal and communicate love. Thus, love as its point of departure and making constant reference to it, the recent Synod emphasized four general tasks of the family: 1) forming a community of persons, 2) serving life, 3) participating in the development of the society, 4) sharing in the life and mission of the church (PJPII, Familiaris Consortio).

As far as the aforementioned role and mission is concerned, nothing’s new really in its fundamentality, since its role and task had been specified since the dawn of the first family on earth – our fore parents. However, the love of the husband and wife is a “unique” participation (and therefore always old yet always new) in the mystery of life and love of God himself as specified by Pope John Paul II.

Intense secularization, is I guess something new in the open. The revolution of the new age gadgets, music, fashion an events mushroomed into an enticing lure that outrageously twists the unguarded consciousness of the young. I don’t mean to fully conclude that these stuffs are distructive. Rather most of these in fact, are intended to patch-up man’s mundane incapacities. Thus, leading to their comfort and felicity.

On the other hand, the maleficent aftermath is seems evident and radical than those of the beneficent effects. In a world view, people, especially the youth prefer to hobnob on malls and other places of joints and vanities than attending their moral and spiritual obligations on Sundays and instances calling for it. In our own perspective, in particular, what are locked in the palm of the majority in this present generation, especially of the youths, is a handful of a highlighted electronic buttons and the tingling tease of its teensy ringing tones – no other than the revolutionary breakthrough in the bivouac of communication – the cellular phones. Again, this is of a high significance to people especially of a far-flung communications. But what is demeaning here – is that this gadget syntheticate the natural a personal communications between men especially those who need close and actual intimacy. And, worse in this matter, it menacingly mingle in the family’s essential sense of communication. And how – experiences tell a lot.

This is just one of the many and the like factors that somehow radically influence the society, specially its essential cell – the family. Because what is intense and offensive secularization but to put a sturdy material boundary between the precious signature of love within the family circle, which is an intimate familial communication. Else, how could a family be a breading chamber of lives for themselves and to others if some of their members were so engrossed to night sessions, trite and skin-deep television shows, texting and malingering around with mostly impertinent company. How could a family take a step towards fulfilling their mission if they are blinded and scattered by the haze of materiality?

I guess its high time to keep the red lights on. Exercise the family’s synergistic and unitive aspect. So that they might be in full force to face the impending challenges awaiting them in this world. Revitalize the family’s dying potential flames to communicate love, to form community of persons, to serve life, to cooperate in the development of the society and to share the life and mission of the church.