Life Lesson #1 – Be Generous
Generous in a right way…
I grew up in an environment where we were too poor to afford a proper meal. We had so much porridge with light soy sauce until today that we remember how fortunate we are. During my whole 6 years in Primary school, I was only given five cents by my parents and I would save over five days to eat a small bowl of soup noodles. I could not understand why my dad was treating his good friends with beer and giving away all our harvest from the farm land to his friends.
It’s only after many years of thinking and observation, I finally realized his reason. My grandpa passed away when my dad was 12 years old and he only had his good friends in the kampong to rely on. This is probably the reason why my Dad believes that friendship is more important than anything in his life. In my life, I kept thinking and observing people as well as myself on how I treat myself, my family and my friends.
The value I hold today is about keeping a balance in my life on the relationship:
1. Between myself and I try to pamper myself and treat myself better every moment. (What are you trying to say?) I will make it a point to always cheer myself, keeping my spirit up, reading more motivational materials, workout my body every other day to maintain it, go for spa and facial at least once a month, traveling to feel the world and enjoy my preferred social activities.
2. Between my family and myself. Our family is the key to our mental health and it’s important to have unconditional love for everyone. When there is unconditional love, there is no need even to measure if we are fair or not.
3. Between my friends and myself. Friendships are built up by elements like, care, love, respect and trust. The way to keep the relationship going is to constantly find ways to maintain it. While I am writing this, I am seated at a good friend’s dad wake. I hope that by being here to help them out during (their lowest point) the peak hour like the dinner time is a way to shower my good friend with my unconditional love.
4. Between the environment and myself, I will always make sure I am doing every possible thing to contribute to this world by reading up, writing to contribute to our society , turning junk to better resources to care for mother earth, participate regularly in charity work and using up all my resources to help contribute to a better world. One of the strange things is the more I try to use up my resources, the richer I become.
Till now, I benefited by thinking how my dad could be so generous when everyone in the family didn’t even have enough to feed ourselves, and this thinking has helped me a long way…