This year started bleakly for me if not for a promise of a new life. As you might as well know, I took the Bar Exams last year and was hopeful during the first part of this year to finally be a lawyer. But alas, despite all the perseverance and prayers, the living-the-good-life-hoping-for-good-karma, it was not to be. I am not saying I won’t be a lawyer, but that I just was not meant to be one this year.

While waiting for the results of the exam, I was in a limbo. Floating and suspended in colloids. I was running around in circles with, of course, no direction. With no compass to guide me, I knew I was doomed to fall into an abyss of desperation. Please don’t mistake me. I don’t discount the fact that my family was there to support and love me while I was enduring the torturous long wait for the results. My family after all is everything to me but the bar. Taking the bar though muddles one’s senses. It delineates you from what’s really important in life. It lead me to think that love is just not enough motivation, especially as it involved the ever present pressure relating to the bar.

Even before I fell, the promise was fulfilled. A new sense of direction was instilled in me. I got a call that I was to start training as a Publishing Specialist in Thomson Reuters on that faithful 22nd day of March. If Napoleon has the ides of March, I have the strides of March.

Suddenly, the bar exam was relegated to the background. Its pulse became so faint and intangible as I started to get busy during the training. When the final blow came, it came softly, deadened by that promise of a new life that is Thomson Reuters. What I thought in the past a blow that would surely stagger and end the life of me, came as a friend, a friend reminding me of the bitterness that comes with life. But a bitterness that is not only an end but also a beginning, my alpha and omega.

There are signs and there are symbols. Is not the timely job offer a sign from the heavens that there is life beyond the bar exams? Is not my turning forty years old during my first few months in Thomson Reuters semiotic? Wise men say, and even those not so wise, that life begins at forty. I began a new chapter or shall I say turned a new leaf in my life here in Thomson Reuters, a new life that started with a promise and is still teeming with more promises, where colleagues are friends and the job rewarding, where your intellect will be honed to heights yet unknown.

Ergo, the best thing that 2010 has given to me is a promise fulfilled and promises abounding.

Thank you TR for lending me direction to a new life.