Yesterday was the last day of the Manila International Book Fair at the SMX Convention Center. Five days of literature and literacy, of parents haggling over discounted textbooks, of teenagers lining up for a favorite author’s signature, of retirees quietly filling a tote bag with paperbacks they plan to read in the next months or years.
But scattered across the week, and beyond it, are dozens of smaller, quieter gatherings that never make it to a festival program, like small walking tours and barangay fitness events, writing workshops and readers meet-ups, and so on.
On September 19, Manilakad will lead a walking tour through Banawe, tracing a district’s history one street corner at a time. At Asian Hospital, for example, the Senior Wellness Club meets every last Tuesday of the month, and cancer survivors gather every last Saturday-not for treatment, but for company. In San Pedro, Laguna, barangays are organizing tai chi and qigong sessions for their older residents. Inside Manila Southwoods, retirees do the same, twice a week, inside their own village. Avida Residences Sta. Catalina and the Vermosa Sports Hub in Cavite run their own regular fitness sessions. In Metro Manila’s public spaces like Roxas Boulevard, the Mall of Asia seaside, and Blue Bay Walk, free Zumba sessions have quietly become weekend fixtures for people who will never set foot in a gym.
None of these are loud, and none of them come with a ribbon-cutting or a press release. And that, I think, is worth noticing.
We are, as a country, currently exhausted. Disasters queue up one after another, and the political noise-the corruption scandals, the finger-pointing, the sense that accountability keeps getting postponed-has left a lot of us tired in a way that doesn’t show up on the news. Against that backdrop, a Zumba class by the bay or a walking tour through an old neighborhood can look almost trivial. But is it?
These small, self-organized efforts are how ordinary Filipinos keep their lives intact when the bigger institutions feel unreliable. A barangay doesn’t need a national program to get its lolas and lolos moving on a Saturday morning. A hospital support group doesn’t need a budget line to let cancer survivors sit together and simply talk. A handful of neighbors in a subdivision can decide, on their own, that Tuesdays and Thursdays are for tai chi, and that decision alone becomes a small act of care-for the body, yes, but also for each other.
There’s a version of resilience we like to romanticize in this country. It’s the bayanihan spirit that shows up after typhoons, the volunteers wading through floodwater. That kind of resilience matters. But there’s a quieter kind too: the discipline of showing up to a walking tour, a book fair, a writing workshop, a wellness meet-up, a qigong session, week after week, simply because it keeps you sane and connected. It’s less photogenic than disaster response, but it’s just as much a form of holding the country together.
If you’re looking for something to do this week, you don’t have to go far, and you don’t need an occasion. Check what your barangay, your village association, or your nearest hospital already has running. Chances are, someone nearby has already started something small. And showing up might be the most normal, most quietly radical thing you can do at this time.