It’s Saturday night, and I chose to skip my weekly Saturday night outs for the reason that I’ve accumulated so much stress over the past few weeks. With a luxurious massage last night, I feel somehow revived, ready to work again, but only after I take a full rest this weekend. ( With the exception of a Sunday lunch *winkwink* )

After work, I gleefully went home, went to my room and watched HBO - and it turned out to be this old ( well, not really old ) movie, Chances Are starring Robert Downy Jr. (who, I must say, looked so much like John Lloyd Cruz in this film, since he was still young then ) and Sybill Shephered (who, I thought was incredibly gorgeous and young then ) . The movie was about love lost, reincarnation, and finding love again.

To summarize the story, Louie, Corrine’s husband dies early, leaving Corrine devastated and unwilling to look for another life partner, not knowing that her friend Ryan has always loved her. After tens of years, a character shows up, named Alex, who is interested in Corrine’s daughter, Miranda. When Alex visits their household, Alex strangely realizes that he is, Louie! Well, Louie’s reincarnated self, that is. And then the story goes on…

The movie drove me to tears because I am sensitive to losing someone I love. When Corrine finally realizes that what Alex says is true, tears start falling from her eyes, as I start to cry too. And I got to hear the wonderful, absolutely haunting instrumental of “After All”, an 80s hit by Cher and Peter Cetera. After All was actually included in the soundtrack of this movie, I think that it was the theme song for it!

The thing that intrigued me about the film is about the concept of past lives and reincarnation. Now, I am a firm believer in reincarnation - devouring books by Edgar Cayce, and maybe someday, I’d like to have a professional perform a regression on me , because I want to know about my past life, or lives, too. It’s a concept widely believed by religions in the world such as Hinduism and Buddhism, but in the Catholic faith, it is not.

Even if I am a Christian, I still believe in it because my heart says that it is real. I’ve read up on Jaime Licauco’s book, and it said that reincarnation was believed by the Christians, until the wife of Emperor Justinian ordered the concept of reincarnation to be erased from the doctrines.
Sometimes, I feel eerie towards a place- either when I go to a place, or just see the place from TV. I feel like I have been a gypsy in my past life - in all her wild abandon, dancing the night away.

A thought came into my mind - if we have multiple lives, how come only a few lucky ones get to remember their past lives? How come that we are not aware of our past lives? It just seemed that we are living one life, and as we drift off to the next, we are left with no memory of our former lives unless we compel for the memories to be retrieved again - anamnesis, as they say it is. I wonder who in my present life have I bumped in from the past, and what my relationship to them were. Was my bestbud my mother in my past life? Was my father my boss? Hahaha! Shucks, that would drive me more than nuts to figure it out.

So until I figure it out, I would always be fascinated with past lives, and will adopt a Vita Brevis approach to live - Vita Brevis , means life is short. I got this quote from the book Vita Brevis by Jostein Gaardner, who, in this book, exposed a letter from Saint Augustine’s former lover. The authenticity of it is still questionable, but I absolutely loved the words, and thoughts. It was full of pain, and passion. Going back, the quote was, “Life is short, we have only this life to live. ”

Yes indeed, life is short, and we have only this life to live. It just means we shouldn’t give up in what we want in life, and give our best shot in it, because this is, only our best shot, as for our consciousness will allow us to, for now.