Yesterday as I was pulling our cows to the barn with my 13-year-old son at our small house in Longlong, La Trinidad, Philippines, he told me, “Dad, school days are near and it rains every day. What a time to start school.” I stopped and wondered. What a time indeed.

Even for me who has to end my vacation and go back to work. It will be days involving deadlines, uncooperative sources or spats with editors—I grouse and rant thinking about it.

For more than a month, I did nothing but stay home with my son. We worked from eight to five laying poles to stretch hog wires to keep off stray dogs from the garden.

More than that, we talked. Talked like we never did before. He talked about how his math teachers seemed uglier and meaner than usual. How the school restrooms smelled more and more like ashtrays and that the world was fast coming to an end before he reached college.

I told him of the funeral pyres in Baktaphur, Nepal where they burn the poor corpses with a handful of rice straw and kick them down the river only to be ripped apart by waiting monkeys. Of working with the Harijans in Pune, Maharahstra, India where dead children are peddled for a bite of food, and of the dead and the dying in our own Mindanaoland where Muslim children are raised as young guns to fight invisibly against war-tested Philippine troopers.

My work calls for me to travel around the Philippines and some countries most of the time. When he was born, I was in Ireland finishing a PhD; I stayed in other countries as he grew and every time I came home, I knew we both hankered for talk.

We talked and said that cynicism was our fault and the rest was the fault of the generation that lay before him (me included). Maybe the world would be better off had it not been for people who went ahead of him, he said. I could only nod in agreement, knowing indeed, there is truth to the innocent thought he passed.

In between gasps and a drink of water I glanced at my son. Fast growing, eager to go out and face the world, whatever the world has to give. I never thought of it much, as work has always preoccupied me.

For many of us, work lays claim to our time and emotion, possessing us completely as any spouse or child. But those of us who think we have hard jobs can learn a lot from those who really do.

I wondered how the people I saw working against nature in Quezon to pull out dying and dead victims from the typhoon’s wrath get the strength to do so. I wonder how some people counsel rape victims, investigate murder scenes, operate on dying patients, then have the energy to cheer their kids’ local basketball team on Saturdays. I now wondered how, my son, battered an defeated with his sepak takraw team go home and smile to say, “The game was great dad!”

If the rest of us can’t keep the stress of work from oozing over and staining the rest of life, how can they? More to the point: If they can, why on earth can’t we?

When we separate the perspective of our silent privacy to that of working for life, we lose perspective. Other people build walls and maintain distance. My good friend Dr. Charles Cheng sometimes calls me to have coffee with him. We don’t talk much. He asks how my day was, I ask him the same question in return. Then we let the dying minutes pass with no word exchanged. He has a bad day. I keep mum. Keeping up walls is the secret to coping with the pain when we feel defeated, lost, and unsure.

This is a lesson for me whose work is not a matter of life and death, but has the ability to use us up nonetheless. The only way to get the work done is to come up for air periodically. To turn off the computer, even on a deadline, and be there for your wife when she comes home tired from work. To say hell with the writing job you’re organizing in your mind even as your editor keeps calling you, and smile to your children when they arrive home.

So we can all go out again tomorrow and do it all again.

I am happy I spent my vacation with son.

“I had a nice vacation with you, Dad,” my son says pulling the last cow inside the barn. “So did I,” I said. “Let’s go home, dinner is waiting.”

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