Summary – Expect things to change in a marriage

Wife: You always carry my photo in your purse Why?
Husband: When there is a problem, no matter how impossible, I look at your picture and the problem disappears.
Wife: You see how miraculous and powerful I am to you?
Husband: Yes, I see your picture and say to myself, “What other problem can there be greater than this one?”

/end joke

To tell you the truth, I don’t think the above joke is funny. But if you surf the net, you will find a whole genre of jokes all devoted to describe how marriage is the ultimate torture.

Marriage is some of the most beautiful gift given by Allah to us. How can it be a torture? Where could it go wrong? There are so many ways, and this is (in my opinion) one of the major factors.

When we get married, we sometime make the biggest mistake of thinking our life will be the same. It is not. If before we always have time for ourselves, reading books, surfing the net.. after marriage we must make room for our spouses. Everything will change, but for people who know this fact beforehand, they will gladly make the change, to live happily with the spouse. Instead of enjoying their time alone, they can now enjoy them together. These are the people who delighted to give room and compromise for their spouses and often can live the fairy tale end of happily ever after.

But to those who expect things to be the same, they will feel choked with all the room taken away from them. But instead of thinking on ways to compromise, they will blame the spouse entirely. They can’t read their favorite books, or go out with friends and they assume it is all because of their marriage. That’s why they will never find happiness.

The secret to all this is to compromise. Compromise means we try to meet at the middle when there is conflict. For example, the husband likes fishing but the wife doesn’t want him to go, However the wife likes to jog but the husband are just too lazy to do that. Maybe they can come up with a compromise, that the wife will have to make peace with the husband’s hobby of fishing in return, the husband will have to accompany her jogging. That is a good compromise. Try to strive for win-win situation.

This is our wife or husband we are talking about, It must always be our intention to make them happy. So please be considerate. We are all new at this, so give each other a break once in a while. 🙂 The most important message here is that expect things to change in a marriage… all we can do is to adapt and compromise. We WILL live happily every after.

How About you? How did you handle conflict alike?

Summary – An important factor to solving problem that we often forget

I think I found out why we are so stressed when handling major problem. 🙂

Ok, I’m sure most of us are good problem solver. We handle problems on a daily basis, from as big as how to live our life to as small as to how to kill time while waiting for a tv show to start. We knew almost every trick on how to manage stress. And had had lots of experience handling it.

But still, why when we were faced with a problem, those major ones like debt, bad in-laws or evil boss, we often stressed out when we cannot solve the problem as fast as we can. I think I know why…

I really believe that one of the contributing factors is due to the television we watch. First of all, I’m not saying that television is bad and must be banned for the sake of humanity :). This is just an opinion.

Almost all television series especially sitcoms will show the problem faced by the husband and wife, or parents and children. Most importantly, it also shows how the problem is solved within the 20 minutes show. Maybe, just maybe.. we are actually influenced by this, and we expect all our problems to be solved in the shortest time, hours top. We are now lacking one of the key ingredient to problem solving, which is patient.When parents faced their rebellious children, they expect the children to be obedient almost instantly. They have no patient what so ever to slowly advice the children. They expect results immediately. We all know, for those rebellion type, the harder we go against them, the harder they will rebel.

When a husband found out that his wife is seeing another man, he immediately scolded her, and those stupid ones may even resolve to divorce. Simply because we lack the patience. In Islam there are ways to resolve marriage associated conflict, advising, sleep separately, third party etc.

These two examples show how patience is sometimes needed in solving problems. There are other situation that may need prompt action, but that would be discuss in another time.

Maybe that’s why we can see the older generation is more patient than ours. Hm..

Conclusion – life is not a show on a television. Some problems need time and patience to be resolved.

————–Personal Note————-
Ramadhan is a very good tools to recover back the patience quality we may have forget. Be patient to break the fast, Be patient when somebody flame you, Be patient when you know there’s nothing more you can do.  

Summary – What is Ramadhan?

It’s that time of the year again… Ramadhan is here 🙂 It is most probably to start this coming Thursday. First of all, I would like to take this opportunity to wish all my friends reading, “Selamat Menyambut Ramadhan”.

This will be the first of the many tributes to Ramadhan I will write. The entries written is dedicated generally to all of us Muslim reading, specifically to myself… since I admit that I have A LOT to improve.

So can I ask what is Ramadhan to you? Is it just the name of the month where Muslim will be fasting? or does it have any other definition to you? We must first establish this before we even start fasting. Otherwise what difference would our fasting be from the diet practised worldwide.

Ramadhan is actually more than a mere month. It is basically a training academy for us muslim. So are we ready to go into this training? Just imagine you’re walking and an old friends come to see you and ask you to join a training. What would be your first reaction?

You will then ask “What training?”, “To achieve what?” and “What’s in it for me?”. Don’t you agree that these responds are exactly what you need to know before you enroll in any training or program?

So what do you think the answers would be for the three questions? It is interesting that this training academy is actually supervised by no other, but by us ourselves. If we don’t want to fast, who will know? It is entirely up to us… so as the supervisor of this training, do you have the answers for the three questions? No answers are wrong answers I tell you, simply because these answers are basically what we want for ourselves. So if it is not too much trouble please share your opinion here. If not, just thinking about the answers is very much appreciated.

We really have to know what we’re doing. Take eating for example, “How?” We put food in our mouth, chew and swallow. “To achieve what?” a healthier body, “What’s in it for me?” no more hunger. All answers are equally important.

• If we don’t know how to swallow, there’s no point reading all those health books and knowing how a chicken would taste.

• If we don’t know anything about health, we will be eating, and we will not be hungry but the food we eat will eventually kill us

• If for example our tounge has loss its sense of taste and thus we cannot enjoy the taste of food anymore. We will be eating healthy food but after sometime, the desire will deteriorate and we may end up (hilang selera makan) and possibly sick.

– Other related entries –

• Dari Mana Nak Kemana – The beginning of this blog
• The Story – Childhood memories of an “almost-fight” happened during Ramadhan night

————–Personal Note————-
Again… “Selamat Menyambut Ramadhan” to all :). Hopefully we can gain other thing this month other than weight 🙂

A man hated his wife’s cat and he decided to get rid of it. He drove 20 blocks away from home and dropped the cat there. The cat was already walking up the driveway when he approached his home.

The next day, he decided to drop the cat 40 blocks away but the same thing happened.

He kept on increasing the number of blocks but the cat kept on coming home before him. At last he decided to drive a few miles away, turn right, then left, past the bridge, then right again and another right and so on until he reached what he thought was a perfect spot and dropped the cat there.

Hours later, the man calls his wife at home and asked her, “Lynn is the cat there?” “Yes, why do you ask?” answered the wife. Frustrated the man said, “Put that cat on the phone, I am lost and I need directions.”

/end story

Moral of the story :

• Do not hate cats..
• “Malu bertanya sesat jalan” 🙂

————— Personal Note ————————–
I used to have pets with my brothers. There were cats, birds, tortoise etc. The thing is, we don’t give them fancy names like Putih, Belang or anything. We actually name them Kucing for the cat, and Kora for the tortoise. Birds I don’t remember.We took care of the Kora the longest. I think for more that 6 or 7 years. It grew from a little as the size of two fingers until it reached the size of about 20 cm.

Personally I think owning a pet is a big responsibility. And if we cannot take care of them, it is better to leave them alone. What do you think?