A good friend of mine, Ms Intan had previously asked my opinion on a subject which is “When to give advice?”. Well this is what I think.

The ground rule is you should always give advice. Giving advice is basically another words for voicing your opinion or to remind. In fact I remember there’s a saying in Islam, Do remind each other, as reminding each other is beneficial to mukminin.

However as always, there will be few factors one need to consider before giving any advice.

Factor 1 – The Person Giving

• Must be very sure of the advice. Don’t advise anyone to walk in the dark, when you are not sure where the cliff is

• It is always better if the giver practise the advice first before advising others. However we must know that the advice will always be more important than the giver. A drug addict advises us not to use drug is a good advice. And we should take it irregardless of the giver condition.

Factor 2 – The Person Receiving

• If the person ask for advice then it is almost an obligation for you to help. Who else will help?

• However if the person clearly say no advice needed. we should know what to do. Some people prefer to settle their problem their way, and this is a good quality.

• Sometime pople asked for help, but when we offered the help or advice it’s like “curahkan air kedaun keladi”. He expect us to agree and back him up. Truthfully, I always get annoyed with this people. And I usually just back away.

Factor 3 – The Advice

• It is very important that you believe your advice is beneficial or at least better. Friend A is giving advice to B about how smoking will make him look more cool. Obviously you disagree, (advice against smoking is always better).. it would be wrong if you don’t stated your stand there.

• The advice must be beneficial to the receiving person, not to you. For example, your best friend has a crush on a girl, and he asked for your advice. once you see the girl, you decided to sabotage this friend of yours so that you will have better chance with her. you then advise your friend to run her with a motorcycle… that’s wouldn’t just be non-ethical… that’s plain evil.

I’m sure there’s a lot more we can add to this rule. Anything else that I missed? please help add in.

Conclusion – the rule of thumb when you are not sure is to think with both your heart and mind. you usually will already KNOW the answer.

————–Personal Note————-
There are millions of reason why we should not interfere. But how do we live our life when we see a child learning to smoke in front of us.. and all we do is look the other way. Aren’t we all related?

Summary – First thing in my mind.. wrong answer

When people say Ramadhan or “Bulan puasa”, what are the first things that come to our mind? I try this question myself.. and these are the answers that first come to my mind.

1) Breaking fast with family

I enjoyed this so much.. somehow it will always be last minute, and things will go in a rush. My family often break our fast on the floor in the living room because of the extra space. We can see people going to and fro from the kitchen bringing food. When all the food is served, we will all see with awe the varieties of food, and usually end up with a silent pledge to buy fewer food the next day. (of course it will only be a pledge). And another fact amazes me is how the last 10 minutes are the longest minutes in the entire history of mankind :)… everytime!

2) Bazaar Ramadhan

For those who have no idea, it is a place where all kind of food will be sold especially for breaking fast. You can see some of the most exotic food and “kuih” there. Legend has it, that once the time has come to break fast, all food will be FOC. heheh but this legend had never been tested simply because I never want to break fast there 🙂

3) Morey (pronunced Moray), “Malam Tujuh Likur” etc

/end answer

Truthfully, I loved everything about Ramadhan especially the above. And I have no intention to ask you not to love them… This is our culture, if we don’t stand up to it, who will?

That’s when it occur to me, that I remember Ramadhan only in its cultural form. Ramadhan is actually an “ibadah” (worship), but instead of remembering all the blessing and forgiveness in Ramadhan, I had choose to remember the cultural side of it, which is all the answers above.

We don’t remember Ramadhan as the month we should double all our “ibadah”, cry for fogiveness in the silent night, trying to earn that Lailatul Qadar, or the month where we should train ourselves to be better, and most importantly to continue the better state after Ramadhan.

It’s actually good that we had integrated our culture with Islam. That’s the beauty of Islam.. But the danger will come, when the cultural side had already overwhelmed the true nature of is, we no longer see Ramadhan as an “ibadah”.

What do you think? how do you remember Ramadhan? cultural or from Islam POV? Personally… I still like to associate Ramadhan with our culture 🙂 I think, it’s still ok provided you know what Ramadhan actually is. 🙂

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.