People with Integrity

I never wanted to become a teacher until that day I had the chance to help a poor community in Cadiz, Negros Occidental when I was going on third year in college. I gave up my selfish ways and learned to give more of myself to be able to share what I know. Then I decided to enter the service industry and become a teacher.

My first four years of teaching was almost utopic. I did not encounter so many problems, or grave enough problems for me to remember them now, until I tried to seek greener pastures - you can take this figuratively or literally.

Don't get me wrong: I love the students and I love my salary. It's some of the people around me that I have to really contend with. These are people who say nice things in front of you, but say another in official documents. These are the people who calumnize and defame other people among friends, and do the same to their friends when they are not around. These are the people who complain - in fairness, they do have basis for their complaints - but leave it at that: a complaint. These are the people who criticize efforts of other people dismissing them as fruitless. And these are the people who evaluate you at the end of the school year.

For some time, my brains could not absorb the fact that there are actually people who behave like this. I thought these people only exist in movies, but I guess not. Maybe I'm just really naive. Because I didn't understand why they think and act that way, I started nurturing dissatisfaction for the organization. I became an overgrown angst-ridden teenager. I wanted to understand so I approached a more seasoned colleague. Her advice: lower my expectations. It was and is still a difficult to do. I received another advice from a Philosophy teacher: The reason why people behave the way they do is because the person is endowed with so much freedom making him or her a real incarnated mystery.

True, so true. People are not robots. We can't expect them to behave in a certain way. God did not create us as if we are all programmed. (Thank God for that!) Then there is really room for differences and greater struggle to understand. Being persons with intellect and freedom, the way they behave is already beyond our control. We cannot simply control them. The only thing we can really control is ourselves - how we will handle and deal with them.

So I am not going to act like the victim here. Am I complaining? Yes, I am. Am I doing something about it? Yes, I am. What am I doing? I am not letting them ruin my day. I am not fighting back because I do not want to waste my energy on them. I am praying for them that God may enlighten them, and eventually see their true colors.

Perhaps the guilty people are reading this essay now. They will only react in two ways: admit their faults and decide to change, or flare up in defense.

You may be in the same position as I am now be it in the corporate or academic world. We also have two choices in front of us: to react or to be proactive about it and use our God-given intelligence to understand. I guess it's time for more people to take the road less taken. These are the people with real integrity.