Ruzaini Zul muses on a possible recipe for life.
I have just finished watching No Reservations starring Catherine Zeta-Jones and other great actors and actresses. I really like to go for romantic-comedy movies, with a little taste on drama and real life situation but filmed in a rather unique technique.
Sometimes I get to see life behind them, and sometimes they just provoke me to think and evaluate the dogma and norm that we have been practising.
Being a perfectionist would always mean that the whole world is wrong except one’s perfect scheme and ways. Things have got to work exactly in order and perfectly accomplished. Well, fingers should not be pointed to anybody. Don’t think of perfectionists as dictators — they do make our lives run in an orderly and well-managed manner. But yes, life is not always about getting things to work exactly like we want them to.
Perfection sometime is the worst dereliction, depending on perceptions of the surrounding people.
Whether we realise it or not, our whole life has always been dictated and ordered. From childhood, we are programmed to follow what the elders say without asking much. We are so used to taking orders and performing them without much consideration, that we are so addicted to the word “dictate” that most of the time we fail to appreciate the art of tolerance.
Perhaps that is what we are lacking. Everybody is so tense that we leave no room to loosen up a little. My sympathy goes to the children of our generation. Because of the systematic dogma that we have practised all this while, the young generation is always left with limited viable options to discover that there is more than meets the eye, and that life is not only confined to the question of right and wrong without due justification.
I know that because I went through the same thing, and now, without realising it, it is being practised to my little sister. She now leads her life in a dull way, confining herself to matters and things that she knows well, not through her own adventurous discovery but by means of picking up from other people, from people who won’t explain to her but force her to swallow what she is being told without due deliberation.
It distresses me a lot to learn this. Why can’t we be more inquilinous? Why can’t we let our children learn the beauty of life on their own? While it is good for parents to be participatory in the upbringing of children, it nevertheless proves detrimental to the development of the children, considering the sad fact that from the moment babies in our society are able to appreciate what we tell them, almost 90% of their input is received in a negative tone. They hear more of the word “no” as compared to encouraging words. Perhaps it is an apt time that the traditional way of rising children be abandoned for good.
I believe it does no harm to the kids if parents loosen up a bit and engage more with the children. Please do not be too preoccupied with work and finance because the truth is, kids could not even be bothered if their parents don’t have enough to buy meals; they won’t hate their parents for failing to get them things that they ask for. Children despise their fathers and mothers who do not spend enough time with them or when they choose to have a bibik to baby-sit and attend to the emotional needs of the kids rather than being responsible to those pertinent matters themselves.
We all know that family is the backbone and essence of society. Childrens’ attitudes are shaped by the family’s interaction with them. So, parents should take note of this. For future parents, think carefully before deciding to have kids. The son is the glory of the parents while the daughter is the delight to the heart; they are not meant to be dictated.
Ruzaini hails from Kota Kinabalu, Sabah and having resided in various places within 17 years of his life (within Sabah only, of course), he has a problem identifying any specific place to be called his hometown. Instead, he borrows a phrase from Dr. Farish Noor’s “The Nomad Prayer” in his book “Qur’an and Cricket” — “God take me home. And let my home be everywhere.”