Betrayal happens to many people- especially coming from those you trust or who are related to you. Often, when someone you trusts so much cheated you, they take away more than the money and time you’ve invested in the relationship. They may take away your faith in mankind.
The period dealing with it involves a host of emotions- anger, hurt, bitterness and even grief. It’s hard to articulate, so I thought I share it from a perspective of an 80 year old woman.
There’s a 80 year old lady I call Ah Mah who have always been very kind to me. She is a great cook and a natural healer and from the time I’ve known her more than 5 years ago, she had always been concerned, kind and cared for me. I’ve stayed with her in Johor, Kelantan and Thailand- and she saw to it that my food is taken care of- so when she’s there, I was always healthy and hearty.
Recently she came to town for a visit. So I took the time to visit and catch up with her. Parting with her is always sad for me- she’s like grandma to me.
But what I wish to write about is her outlook over the years on betrayal. Initially, it was bitterness, then anger and finally come acceptance. Life had not be kind to her most of the time, and yet, she still remained the same- kind to people.
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Andrew Matthews mentioned in his book that we should always give our best in all the work that we do, even though we are not particularly thrilled about it and even though we are stuck in death end jobs that we do not like.
In his book, Happiness Now, he gave an example of a person known as P.C Taylor who removes garbage from the underground tubes in the subway tunnels of New York. He spends his life in the dirty, rat infested tunnels hurling garbage and killing rats- a job he held for 25 years.
When interviewed, P.C said he loved his job and is proud of it because he said, “Homeless people live down there in those tunnels. And I’m helping to give them a better home. And while I’m helping the homeless, I’m putting my two daughters through college!”
My mom spent more than 30 years working in the second and third class wards in a government hospital as a staffnurse. If you’ve been to a government hospital in Malaysia, walking into the old buildings of second and third class wards feels depressing. Even the walls seemed to tell stories of countless depressed patients- past and present who had lived there. I noticed that nurses in first class seemed to be more free and have more time sitting around.
I checked with my mom recently, “the work load in second and third class is really unbearable from what I observed- the nurses have to work non stop to help endless stream of patients. First class ward (air conditioned) seemed like a much more pleasant place to work. I am surprised that you never seemed to complain even though the workload is crazy and the pay sucks.”
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Office gossip and politics are not contusive for our karma, health and happiness. And yet, most of us can’t help but are involved in them. It instilled negative feeling and drains our energies.
Say your colleague who is very close to you totally dislikes someone because of some ‘good and justified reasons’. After a while, you find that the behaviour of the subject in question seems to correlate with the ‘facts’ provided by your colleague. And one day, you happened to be ‘victimized’ or ‘taken for a ride’ by this particular person and now, the both of you spent literally your available time talking bad things about this person.
Do you notice that when you are indulging in gossiping or involved in office politics:
- It creative negative energy and drains you. Have you ever noticed that when you complains about his or her boss, after a while, you may be upset with your boss as well?
- Together with that, you may find yourself developing more bad habits- ie overeating, spending longer at lunch, feeling no energy to start work after lunch, etc.
- The world seemed to you like a ‘mean’ place or a horrible rat race – you feel that you are trapped in the system and become disillusioned with the corporate world.
Sometimes we cannot help it because we are based in the office. With the comfortable air-con, nice pantry, and with sometimes stressful conditions/expectations, we feel the need to vent out the frustration or unhappiness- and soon the sharing leads to ‘bonding’, then office gossip…taking about so-and-so from another office, etc.
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I was only 9 years old when my grandaunt passed away from old age. During that time, I was too young to understand what was life and death. My grandaunt loved me unconditionally from the day I was born- she was about 82 years old and insisted to personally take care of me instead of sending me to the sitter. She said (in Cantonese and I translate to English), “a child looking up the sky grows up very fast. Day and night will pass very quickly and before you know it, she would be all grown up. Please let me take care of her.”
Within a month of taking care of me, the naughty and mischievous baby, her straight back became bent. As my mom worked in shifts as a nurse and my dad worked afternoon till midnight, she was constantly worried how the old lady and the baby fared at home. There was no telephone. Did the old lady fall, or the baby fall, or both fall at the same time?
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Wise people would advise us to keep our dreams to ourselves or risk giving it up altogether. Recently I read a book that teaches a person how to achieve our vocation in life.
According to the author, each of us is born with a life vocation- a sort of mission in life that we need to achieve in order to make us more evolved. If we ignore what we should do, then the job will be difficult and we will feel unfulfilled inside.
Sometimes, you want to try out certain things- stuff that is something you are interested in but is way beyond your comfort zone. Usually, we tend to want to share it with our loved ones and friends, hoping to get some words of encouragement, ideas and support. But most of the time, you may find that you meet with ‘dream crushers’ instead. The Dream-Crushers can be your closest family member, spouse or best friend.
Understand that a lot of advice and discouragement is not given with bad intention. Most of the time, they meant well- they don’t want you to get hurt, lose money, waste your time, etc. But a time waster to one is a valuable venture for another, like they say, one man’s meat is another man’s poison.
At the starting point, when you are most vulnerable to give up- because you lack the skills, knowledge or money- it is perhaps it is better you keep your dreams to yourself until you met with success. Most of the time, they will believe it when they see it. [click to continue…]
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by Yin on February 4, 2010
Know that the more that you are capable of the deepest low, the more you can rise up and can turn a direct opposite. Most of the time people who became successful motivation speakers had suffered from the depths of despair and experienced failures. They found ways to bounce back and rose to become the great person that you know today- for example Oprah Winfrey and Louise Hay had been abused as a child. Their experience gave them compassion, understanding and empathy to be in the position to help others in similar predicament.
You may be at the lowest point in your life and felt that you possibly cannot sink any lower that this. You may also felt that there’s no point of living.
Hang on there, dear pal…..
Don’t give up so easily. You have already gotten this far- it will be okay, come what may- you will get through it.
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by Yin on January 6, 2010
“He’s late…..AGAIN!”
As you stood there at the appointment meeting place, your friend is nowhere to be seen even after 10 minutes. Angry…and even nasty thoughts raced through your mind in the split of a few minutes:
Why is he always late? Doesn’t he have any respect for my time?
He knows I HATE people who are not punctual. And yet, why he keep doing this to ME?
I am going to give him a piece of my mind when he comes…or maybe, I should just walk off and not answer his calls. Let him have a taste of his own medicine
No wonder he cannot get ahead in life- he can’t even get this simple thing done right- what more so for more important things in life? What a loser!
By the time your friend finally shows up, the thoughts that had raced through your mind build themselves up to a crescendo. Even though your friend apologizes profusely, you are convinced that he does not have respect for you. So the entire outing became very unpleasant, with your angry face turning into ugly shades (we may be shocked at how horrible we look when we are controlled by anger). It was an outing that you have looked forward to but now, no words, expect monosable answers you give when being spoken to. You had hoped that your friend would start being more punctual but the next time, he is late….again.
So how do you react to such situation?
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by Yin on December 22, 2009
I believe there must be a number of people out there who are seriously thinking of quiting their jobs go either go for a lower paying job or go travelling. Because that is how I noticed a number of visitors have found my blog and stayed on to read more articles.
Since I have experience quiting my job and end up going for travelling, let me share my experience with you:
Actually, as I have mentioned in previous posts, I’ve never thought about quiting my job to go travelling. I resigned after 9 years with the same company because I felt I needed to concentrate fully on my own research project into complementary healing. My day job requires almost all of my available brainpower- leaving me like a zombie at the end of the day- I usually leave the office long after sunset. Weekends are used mainly for recuperating. There are not much energy left for side projects or extensive blogging. So in the end, I thought of just giving myself a breather- and quit for 2 or 3 months. But I ended up travelling instead for almost a year.
I could not have selected a better time to quit- concerned friends said that I must be out of my mind to quit knowing very well the economy was heading for a sure crash- the greatest downturn since The Depression. But I went ahead, because the one who is burnt out is me, not them. Okay, I know they’re burnt out too- but they have too much commitments to just throw in the towel like htat.
Still, it is not a spur of the moment thing where I just arrogantly waltzed in and threw the letter- nope. My boss is someone I’ve known for many years- so I’ve dropped hints that I’ll be saying bye bye months before it actually happened. I did my best to train and prepare my friend to fully take over my position- I wrote some detailed instructions leaving nothing out when I did my handover. So no mess behind and parted in amicable manner.
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by Yin on December 16, 2009
About few months back, I’ve attended a course on investment. The speaker is a very sincere guy who has many years of experience in the investment industry. He mentioned 3 golden rules to follow with your money. The first rule is: INVEST YOUR MONEY IN ORDER TO GROW IT
Invest your money
We would not hesitate to grab that pretty dress or that nice designer sunglasses that cost hundreds of ringgit. And we make such type of purchases every month. But when it comes to putting aside a small amount for investment, many people are just relunctant to do it.
Having literally flushed my hard earned money for years down the drain, indulging in my gourmet coffee habit and impulse shopping, I kept asking myself why can’t I just have a little more discipline and set aside a small amount each month for investment? After all, I have no idea what happened to my money- I only know that I have spent a lot on my credit card because I could redeem quite sizable electrical items with my reward points earned from credit card purchases.
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by Yin on December 8, 2009
The world today is moving towards passive income. Money making gurus are advocating earning passive income as the way to go- that you can make money while you sleep, play golf, go on vacation, etc.
Passive income is a smart way to earn money and should be the way forward compared to active income. Or it should supplement active income. Active income means that money comes so long as we work. Once a person could not work due to disability or being retrenched, the income stops coming in. Many people consider working in a large corporation as secured and all they need to do is to work till retirement. But as we have all witnessed the uncertainties- the economy crash made many top executives and sole breadwinners jobless overnight. There is no such thing as job security anymore.
The idea of passive income made many people develop the assumption that they need not work hard to earn a living- all they need to do is to figure out shortcuts and loopholes and they can more money in the bank.
Image credit: Brian Zaikowski of bztoons.com
This is the main reason why many people fall for various get rich schemes. People invest the little money they have after being convinced by talks and short cuts with minimal investment of time and money. Whenever you come across such schemes, please research more about it instead of jumping blindly to them. Google about these schemes- and make sure you don’t only land on websites that promote them. Go to forums, hear what others have to say. Then make your decision. Scams can masquerade under different name but with same modes operandi. Be an informed consumer or investor- never follow blindly what others say even though they are your relatives or close friends.
There are only a small tiny percentage of inhabitants on this earth that continue earning passive income from writing songs, recording albums and writing best seller books that are still evergreen for decades to come. For the rest of us, we will need to continue to work on our passive income stream- we need to continue update ourselves to remain competitive. If we sit idle and turned complacent, we would discover that our passive stream would quickly dry up.
Let me illustrate what I mean by giving you two examples:
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