Bitter with the Sweet: Savouring a Zest for Life

By Cecilia B. Mañosa

Drawing from her unique journey as a mother, wife, daughter, sister, widow, and friend– author Cecilia B. Mañosa illustrates how life, with its ups and downs, is worth all of it and meant to be savoured as a delightfully treasured gift.

Bitter with the Sweet is a pragmatic and poignant collection of enriching messages that invite you to partake in the fullness of life. Looking into everyday themes as time, nature, and technology to bonds with children, family, and friends. As it delves into a deeper understanding of happiness, beauty, forgiveness, and loss, it explores life strides such as nurturing self-care, making decisions, building resilience and reinventing yourself.

Using interesting references from contemporary pop culture, Bitter with the Sweet is a tool chest filled with color, truth, and candor, and sprinkled with nuggets of wisdom to take on your own journey, regardless of age. Like having a heart-to-heart with an old friend, this book opens a door to self-awareness and nudges you to ponder your life, relationships, and purpose.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Balboa Press AU
• Release date: Oct 18, 2022
• ISBN: 9781982295912

Cecilia B. Mañosa

Cecilia B. Mañosa is a mother, beach lover, and student of life—for life. A career entrepreneur with a Master of Science in Communications Management, she maintains a philosophy of life that is perceptive, refreshing, and uplifting. Having grown up on different continents, she now divides her time between Sydney and Manila.

Book preview

Copyright © 2022 Cecilia B. Mañosa.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by

any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying,

recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system

without the written permission of the author except in the case of

brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

Balboa Press

A Division of Hay House

1663 Liberty Drive

Bloomington, IN 47403

www.balboapress.com.au

AU TFN: 1 800 844 925 (Toll Free inside Australia)

AU Local: [phone] ([phone] from outside Australia)

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or

links contained in this book may have changed since publication and

may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those

of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher,

and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

The author of this book does not dispense medical advice or prescribe the use

of any technique as a form of treatment for physical, emotional, or medical

problems without the advice of a physician, either directly or indirectly. The

intent of the author is only to offer information of a general nature to help

you in your quest for emotional and spiritual well-being. In the event you use

any of the information in this book for yourself, which is your constitutional

right, the author and the publisher assume no responsibility for your actions.

Cover Image by Malu de Rosario

ISBN: 978-1-9822-9590-5 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-9822-9591-2 (e)

Balboa Press rev. date:   10/17/2022

For the loves of my life,

Erica and Luisa—

because you complete me.

And for my dearest Manolet.

Until our sweet reunion.

Contents

Preface

PART 1

NUTS AND BOLTS

Most of us forget the basics and wonder

why the specifics don’t work.

—Garrison Layman

Time after Time

The Sounds of Music

Nature’s Call

Win or Lose

Pals and Paw Prints

Gadgets and Gizmos

PART 2

TIES THAT BIND

A little bit of crazy, a little bit of loud, but a whole lot of love.

The Heart of the Matter

Family Strong

The Parent Trap

Whenever I Call You Friend

The Power and the Gift of Forgiveness

What We Can Learn from Millennials, Gen Z, and Beyond

PART 3

KEEP CALM AND FEED YOUR SOUL

Keep your eyes on the stars and your feet on the ground.

The Secrets of Happiness

Truth in Beauty

Wait a Little While

Bliss and Blessings

Spirituality and Practice

Note to Self

PART 4

YOU DO YOU

You can’t get what you want till you know what you want.

—Joe Jackson

Be Yourself. Free Yourself

Walk the Way You Talk

Turning the Corner

Learn with Purpose. Live with Passion

Thoughts in the Shower

Made for More

PART 5

PERSPECTIVES

We do not see things as they are. We see things as we are.

—Anaïs Nin

The Imagined Ideal

Loss and Life

The Balancing Act

For Now

Detours and Directions

Of Lemons and Lemonade

Acknowledgements

Sources

Notes

Preface

An Open Letter from a Could-Be Writer

I never thought I could be a writer. At sixty, I’m not even sure I can call myself that. I certainly never believed it at school, where in a small austere Spanish all-girls’ institution in the 1960s and 1970s everyone was typecast and labelled throughout twelve years of restrictive, traditional Catholic education. I was the athlete, basketball captain, volleyball player, and male role in almost every play (height, bob haircut, and athletic built assured that)—never the Mary, but the Joseph in every Christmas play. The closest I came to playing any creative roles at school was being in the drama club and head of props for the glee club concert, even photography editor of the yearbook—but a writer? Not my label, anywhere in my youthful universe.

A bit of a twisted hint came in university, where I was initially interested in psychology but in my freshman year, I met a threatening long-haired hippy of an English teacher who gave me the confidence and initial eagle’s wings to believe that yes, maybe I could write. So, I shifted to communication arts to pursue a more creative and artistic programme. But beyond receiving A’s for term papers, essays, and editing my boyfriend’s business reports, writing was still not in my flight path. By senior year I had explored and enjoyed business and marketing elective classes, which led to my pursuit of a master’s degree in communications management, a course ahead of its time and offered at only two US East Coast colleges (as hybrid courses were still unheard of in the early 80s). And at twenty-three I was in the first graduating class in this specialized field of study.

I was not an avid reader for most of my young life. I would not have described myself as a literary type, as I preferred visual and musical media—films, TV, music, or theatre—to the written word. As I perceived then, book writing was reserved for only the literary geniuses with a gift for prose and an educational background in creative expression learned from years of reading the masters. You had to be exceptionally intelligent and possess a stellar vocabulary to be worthy of being an author of any kind.

But as a wise writer once said, A writer is someone who writes. If you want to be a writer, write! Not that being a writer was a secret wish I held on to (my original dream was to be a photographer), but for years I had always taken notes on anything I felt I needed to hang on to—a scene, a feeling, a quotation, lyrics, a slogan—pretty much anything that spoke to me, made sense, or caught my eye. Maybe lurking somewhere in my subconscious, I wanted to pass these on to my future children someday because before the age of mobile technology and social media, they were tracks of wisdom about life in general.

This brings us to the main reason I decided it was time to complete this long-overdue passion project. We all have one of those (a photo book, a quilt, a painting, a garden, a memoir, a recipe book) that we start to do, but keep putting off for one reason or another—a waiting for the right time to do it kind of personal goal. At this point in my life, (where I’ve had more years behind than I have ahead of me) I am over the preconceived notion that qualified writers are only those who studied to become authors, hold degrees in creative writing, or are reputable columnists or celebrities. I’ve reached a point where I believe a writer is just someone who has something to say and decides to put it down on paper. In that sense, I guess we all have something to say, but whether we put it down on paper and people care to read it remain to be seen.

The only public things I had ever written were yearbook write-ups, a postgraduate thesis, corporate reports, eulogies, and scripts for amateur shows. And although I had been collecting handwritten notes for many years, it wasn’t until I compiled what I had stashed away in notepads, Post-it Notes (bearing witness that these are among the greatest modern-day creations of all time!), bulletin boards, flyers, photos, and on electronically saved lists that I realized what I had accumulated! So, I started to keep these random notes stashed away in multiple files on my laptop. For whenever.

Then came July 2018.

I found out I had a massive brain tumour that could only be removed through a craniotomy—basically only if my brain were opened for it to be extracted. A similar procedure had been done on my two-year-old nephew a few years prior, and his bravery assured me I could handle it. But I wasn’t as afraid for myself as I was for my two daughters, who had lost their dads (yes, there were two dads, and still lost both!), leaving me to be a single parent for most of their years. In my twenties, I lost my mom to ovarian cancer at the age of fifty-seven. My brain tumour was discovered when I, too, turned fifty-seven. Could lightning strike twice or, in my own nuclear family, three times?!

Given that I dreaded claustrophobic MRIs, needles, and anything that involved cutting my body to remove something (except for a baby), to say that I was filled with trepidation is a huge understatement. I even put off reading the pamphlet given to neurology patients in preparation for surgery because whether I read it or not, the surgeons were still going to have to slice my head open! I eventually did read it when I was about a month into recovery, which confirmed that the pre-surgery fears I had were all too real. We were made aware of the risks involved from the get-go, (and we prepared as much as we could), but prior to surgery, I did not openly share with my daughters my palpable fears of possibly not waking up, not recognizing who they were, or being unable to speak, move, or remember anything. I no longer had a husband to leave them with (in case), and there were still a lot of things I needed to share with them that I always wished my mom had a chance to tell me. In the few months leading up to the scheduled surgery, my daughters and I did as much as we could together, doing what we enjoyed, instead of focusing on what scared us the most. Having lost my husband so unexpectedly seven years before, we knew which memories to build on, again in case. We didn’t dwell on it, but I knew we all had it in our minds. What if I didn’t survive the surgery? What if I survived it but was not myself? What if we would not get to have those valuable conversations we usually had over brunch, on a road trip, or snuggled on my bed? All the what- ifs.

My neurosurgeon (God bless his life) told us that judging by the size of the tumour, it had been growing in my brain for fifteen to twenty years. Although it was most likely benign by the look of it, only a biopsy could give us 100 per cent certainty. I had been a walking, ticking time bomb and didn’t even know it. You know what they say: out of the valley of darkness comes a reality check, aka a wake-up call. I should say it was just one of the many, as these calls keep coming throughout one’s life! But this was one of the louder ones heard clearly by my post-surgery tumour-free brain: WHAT ARE YOU STILL WAITING FOR? That someday is today!

So, here goes—

I have lived an ordinary extraordinary life. Some have suggested I write a miniseries rather than a book, as my life’s twists and turns are not of the straight and narrow path. I have lived overseas from as early as age seven, on four different continents at different growth stages of my life. I have always had an open relationship with a phenomenal sage of a father, now a healthy and fit nonagenarian! I lost my mother, a grandmother, a young brother-in-law, an uncle, and two of my best friends to illness. I lost my husband in the blink of an eye on Easter Sunday a month after we celebrated my fiftieth birthday. I have been a single mother twice. I lived with an undetected massive brain tumour, had open brain surgery, and recovered from it. I have loved and lost. Been hurt and healed. Moved and returned. Suffered and survived.

I have stories to tell. And lessons to share.

But this is not a biography, diary, or soap opera script. And it certainly is not an instructional manual on how to live a pain-free life. I was once told that I think differently or ahead of my time (unconventional was the exact word used) and that people don’t always understand or agree with my thought processes. But I am not a psychologist, philosopher, or therapist, and do not claim to be. I am neither an activist nor planning to run for any public office, so this is not a propaganda piece for the purpose of convincing anyone to agree with my views. Given our social media–obsessed world, this is not an attempt to get likes, or make more friends, or judge other people’s life choices. Bitter with the Sweet is not about any of that. Close friends know I prefer to live quietly in a somewhat reclusive manner, and over the years have become more selective about the company I keep. As cliché as some of these thoughts may sound, these are candid and heartfelt words from a mother, daughter, sister, and friend. They are intimate musings and experiential observations that come from the heart and soul of someone who decided to put them out there. Like a message in a bottle, thrown out into the sea for anyone to peruse or toss back into the water.

They are personal letters, if you will, primarily written to my children and their children, with the hope and intention that my life experiences, (and not my informal writing approach) may provide some insight into their personal growth as individuals, partners, mothers, or professionals. And who knows, maybe, just maybe, with all the hustle and bustle of twenty-first-century technological living, some earnest words in a good old book may somehow offer a glimpse, with sensitivity and enlightenment, into what each of our journeys in life is all about. In this ever-increasing commotion and flurry we call life, we can all use a reminder to take a breath and LIVE!

If my children read it, then I’ve accomplished more than any writer could. If others read it, then OK, maybe I can call myself a writer.

Cecilia B. Mañosa

Author

Wordsmith

Scribe

Writer

PART 1

Nuts and Bolts

Most of us forget the basics and wonder

why the specifics don’t work.

—Garrison Layman

BWTS%20CHAPTER%20GLYPH.jpg

Time after Time

Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look

around once in a while you could miss it.

—from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off

W e all have a relationship with time. It can be our friend when we are captured by its wondrous gifts of delightful memorable moments. But it can be our foe when it feels we are merely swept up in its tide or agonizingly suspended in its grasp. Either way, by its very nature, time is a whimsical dimension. We often try to find ways to save or prolong time because we feel we will never have enough of it. We chase it, wait for it, get lost in it, hold on to it, kill it, attempt to make up for it, or even try to buy it. But the one indisputable truth about time is that we all have it in limited supply in the one life we have been given on this earth. The good news is that it is up to us to use this precious gift as we wish. Whether we make it worthwhile or waste it, is our call.

Everyone gets twenty-four hours in one day. We all say we could use more, but no matter how much we rush or try to fit into those hours, that’s all we get. From the time we wake up until we go to bed, our minds are filled with thoughts of what to do with our time. To-do lists, routines, meetings, appointments, and plans for the month, the year, and the future oftentimes play a substantial role in our daily preoccupation. We make time for work, family, friends, obligations, holidays, events, and trips, filling each blank spot on our calendars, that sometimes in our busyness we neglect taking time to simply relish an experience and savour the best parts of those moments.

We focus a lot of our attention on time, but according to physicists, time is not even real. They believe it is a human construct to help us differentiate between now and our perception of the past. That it is simply an illusion made up of human memories, and everything that has ever been and ever will be is happening right now. Albert Einstein believed that time is a stubbornly persistent illusion. And many scientists believe it is a concept that measures objects in motion—to help us define and understand events as being in the past, the present, or the future.

Regardless of any research-based hypotheses, however, we all feel the passage of time, so much so that we give it much importance not only in our daily lives, but even more when we feel its imminent closing stages. We don’t like to think or talk about this much because it’s morbid and scares us, but the cycle of each life has a beginning and an end. We just don’t know when or how it will happen exactly, but we always hope the end comes later rather than sooner. Yet perhaps even sadder than that certainty is that we sometimes also forget what it means to exist within that time. We go about our days and our years doing the same mundane things, thinking we will get around to doing all the other things when we find the time for them. If we are fortunate enough to get a sense of when our clock is about to run out, we have a sudden awakening that the time for a certain thing is now. Almost as if we didn’t know the end would ever come at all, and we hear ourselves say, Where did all the time go?

Part of the song Nick of Time, by Bonnie Raitt, goes like this:

When did the choices get so hard?

With so much more at stake,

Life gets mighty precious

When there’s less of it to waste.

[We’re] scared to run out of time.

As natural procrastinators, we delay, defer, and put things off until a better time or for a time when it feels right to devote our attention to other, not so urgent matters. Somehow, I think this is less a matter of laziness as it is more a matter of distraction. We get so caught up in our day-to-day affairs that all these other things seem to get in the way, requiring us to divert our focus from what we deem to be our main priorities. But as we say, anything can happen—because anything happens all the time! So, like it or not, things will come up that demand our immediate action or attention, cutting into our time and leaving us feeling duped or ripped off because there just wasn’t enough time!

The Bucket List is a movie about two terminally ill men who, after being told they have only six months to live, decide to explore life and do all the things they have never tried before. It is a touching, eye-opening movie, and its title has now been commonly adopted to refer to a list of goals, dreams, and life experiences one hopes to achieve before one dies. To me, the main question of the movie was, must we wait until death is imminent to begin prioritizing the things that matter?

Moreover, is it a matter of time management or a matter of managing our choices? Do we make use of something when its shelf life comes close to the expiry date? Or should we make each moment count because we don’t know when it all ends? For isn’t it precisely because something is limited that gives it more value? Perhaps we should remind ourselves more often to appreciate it while it’s all happening instead of worrying about when it will end. And to not hold off on living with intention because the end could come sooner than we think. Yet how often do we let those timeless moments slip by without noticing them?

In another movie, About Time, a son is told by his father that they both have a special genetic gift of being able to travel back in time, and the father teaches him how to use this power wisely. He advises him not to use it for acquiring wealth and fortune but for things you want your life to be. One of my favourite parts, towards the end of the movie, is when the father gives his son one last piece of advice and tells him to go about his normal day with all the tensions and worries that stop him from noticing how sweet the world can be. And then, with his special gift, to go back and do it all over again, this time noticing. Oh, if only we could all have that special rewind button! To take a mulligan (an extra stroke after a poor shot in casual golf, not counted on the scorecard) and be lucky enough to have do-over days, a chance to get it all right that second time around.

At the very end of the movie, there is a montage showing people going about their daily activities as the main character’s voice-over is heard: We are all travelling through time together, every day of our lives. All we can do is do our best to relish this remarkable ride. Put very simply, life is uncertain. Take time to enjoy the little things with the people who matter.

At the end of each day, however, how often do we pause to look back at what we did with our precious limited hours? Did we spend our time doing what matters