A FRIEND has just been telling me of the time she was held up, a few years ago. For one-and-a-half hours, a man pointed a gun to her side as she sat frozen in fear.

My friend Jo worked at the heart of Metro Manila's financial district. On the evening in question, she worked late and left her office at about 8 in the evening. She boarded a shuttle bus bound for her suburban town that was an hour's drive away from her workplace. Five minutes after she boarded the bus, three men announced a hold-up. They were positioned strategically in different rows. Two of the men had guns and one of them was seated right beside Jo. She was so terrified she kept her arms wrapped around her body the whole time to keep it from shaking. The hold-uppers systematically divested the passengers of their valuables -- cellphones, cash and jewelry. There were about a dozen passengers. None of them made a move until the hold-uppers got down from the bus, 30 minutes after they had so brazenly announced the hold-up.

The event made Jo realize three things: one, that the world is not a safe place; two, that trust in our fellow human beings can easily be shattered; and three, that fear can immobilize and render us powerless.

But Jo did not feel powerless for long. Action re-empowered her and helped her cope with her horrible experience. She and her fellow hold-uppees got together the next day to report the crime to the police. She then wrote up a detailed account of the incident and e-mailed it to all her friends.

My second story took place thousands of miles from the Philippines but is a story the whole world is familiar with by now. I was in San Francisco, California visiting a friend when the World Trade Center in New York was attacked by terrorists. On that day -- September 11, 2001 -- I could not make sense of what was happening so I sat for hours and hours in my friend's living room, my eyes glued to the TV set. As a foreigner in the US, I felt traumatized enough -- so I could imagine how much worse Americans must have felt. Airports were closed down, special events were postponed, Broadway plays and baseball games were cancelled, people stayed home. Americans realized soon enough, however, that the proper response to the attack was not to be immobilized by the terrible events, but to get back on their feet. A political response was forged. Fund drives were launched. People gathered together to share their grief and anger.

MANY OF US may never experience the horror of a terrorist attack, a kidnapping, or a hold-up liike my friend Jo went through. But we are not spared of the little violations in daily life which temporarily render us powerless. It could be a next-door neighbor dumping garbage on our side of the fence. It could be a tyrant of a boss berating us for an insignificant offense. It could be a verbally abusive spouse raining putdowns on us.

My tyrant once took the form of an antisocial cab driver. I took a cab from my home to the university where I held office. I explicitly told the driver to follow a specific route, Without my noticing it because I was engrossed in a magazine article I was reading, he took a completely different route. When I noticed what was happening, I asked him why he had deviated from the route I specified but he did not answer me. I gave him instructions which he continued to ignore. We finally got stuck in a narrow street where nothing was moving at all. By this time I was furious. I paid him what I thought was due him, got off, and left him stuck in a monstrous jam. It did not matter to me that I had to walk a long way in the heat of a noonday sun to get to where I could flag another cab. I just felt so good that I did not allow myself to be at the complete mercy of a jerk.

THE WORLD is not always to our liking. Sometime in our life, we may be dealt a tough hand. It may be "minor irritation-tough," as in the case of my cab driver. Or it may be "life-threatening-tough," as in the case of the American people or my friend Jo and her busmates. We may fumble, go to pieces, or be shell-shocked out of our wits. But if the trauma does not kill us, it is a wise choice for us not to give up and "die" before our time. It is a wise choice for us to give thanks instead that we have survived, and to take charge of our life once again. For as the philosophers at Casino Filipino would say -- it is not the hand that you are dealt with that matters -- it is, in the end, what you make of it.