Alaala

Alaala is the Tagalog word for memory, but in Filipino culture it carries more weight than the simple act of recollection. It encompasses remembrance, longing, and the living presence of those who came before — the sense that the people and experiences that shaped you are not simply past, but present in who you are right now. To hold something in alaala is to keep it alive, to let it continue to mean something, to allow the past to inform the present rather than simply recede from it.

I come to this one personally. My father’s health declined slowly over the years I was caring for him, from lifestyle diseases that were preventable in ways neither of us fully understood at the time. Watching that process up close — the gradual loss of capacity, the way years of accumulated choices showed up in his body — shaped my understanding of health in ways that no textbook could have. His memory is part of why I built this. Not out of guilt, and not out of a desire to rewrite what happened, but because alaala, the way I understand it, asks you to let what you’ve lost teach you something. To carry it forward as wisdom rather than weight.

This is not a uniquely Filipino experience. Most people, if they’re honest, can trace their relationship to their own health back to someone they watched struggle or someone they lost too soon. Those memories are data. They’re also motivation of a particular kind — quieter and more durable than the motivation that comes from wanting to look a certain way, because it’s rooted in something that actually mattered.

There’s a broader dimension to alaala too, beyond personal loss. Filipino culture has a deep relationship with ancestry — the sense that you are not just yourself but the continuation of a long line of people who survived things you’ll never fully know. That survival is in your body. The resilience of your ancestors is part of your inheritance, alongside whatever they passed down in terms of health risk or habit. Alaala invites you to be in conscious relationship with that — to honor what was passed down, to heal what needs healing, and to be intentional about what you pass forward.

Your health is not just yours. It’s a thread in something longer than your own life, and alaala is the reminder to treat it that way.