Lessons of Life
There was a man who had four sons. He wanted his sons to learn not to judge things too quickly. So he sent them each on a quest, in turn, to go and look at a pear tree that was a great distance away.
The first son went in the winter, the second in the spring, the third in summer, and the youngest son in the fall.
When they had all gone and come back, he called them together to describe what they had seen.
The first son said that the tree was ugly, bent, and twisted:
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The second son said "no" it was covered with green buds and full of promise like this:
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The third son disagreed; he said it was laden with blossoms that smelled so sweet and looked so beautiful, it was the most graceful thing he had ever seen ......
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The last son disagreed with all of them; he said it was ripe and drooping with fruit, full of life and fulfillment.
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The man then explained to his sons that they were all right, because they had each seen but only one season in the tree's life.
He told them that you cannot judge a tree, or a person, by only one season, and that the essence of who they are and the pleasure, joy, and love that come from that life can only be measured at the end, when all the seasons are up.
If you give up when it's winter, you will miss the promise of your spring, the beauty of your summer, fulfillment of your fall.
Moral:
Don't let the pain of one season destroy the joy of all the rest.
Don't judge life by one difficult season.
Persevere through the difficult patches and better times are sure to come some time or later.
Be Upbeat and Beat the Blues
Why is the
HDB gearing itself to build 2-room flats and a budget
focused on bringing up low-wage workers? Two different news items appearing almost simultaneously suggest that people and the economy are not doing well.
Nevertheless, our practitioners of politics continue to spout that they are optimistic and upbeat about the economy.
Psychologically, this is a strategy to adopt when you’re feeling low. It chases away the blues. Never mind that you are a cock-eyed optimist. The ends justify the means.
An optimistic personality reduces stress and in reducing stress we fight off illness. Personality affects immune cell strength which influences whether people become sick or not, psychologists say. Tests on the immune system show it is not stress but the way we respond to it that triggers illness and, as expected, those who feel in control have better immune ability.
Mozart was at the lowest point of his life when he composed Symphony No.41. He cast aside his dire circumstances to produce a piece of work that dazzles with vigor, brilliance and majesty. Listening to it, one is literally swept off the feet and carried along with the tide at every trill and twill. There is nothing like it to boost one’s flagging spirit. This majestic piece of work is appropriately nicknamed "Jupiter" and, in Holst's The Planets, Jupiter is dubbed the “Bringer of Jollity”.
The Wolf and the Lamb
The Wolf ...
and the Lamb ...
Aesop's ancient fables make amusing reading and at the same time they offer insights so relevant to present times. In this tale, there are people identifiable with wolfish conduct, the kind who will not listen to argument, plea or accept evidence.
A Wolf saw a Lamb drinking at a brook and set about finding some good reason for catching him. He went to a place a little higher up the stream, and called out:
"How dare you muddy the water that I am drinking!"
"How can I," said the Lamb humbly, "when I drink with the tips of my lips only? And besides, the water runs from you to me, not from me to you."
"Well, last night, while I was trying to sleep, you kept me wake forever with your bleating."
"But how could that be?" asked the Lamb. "I slept on the other side of the hill, inside my master's barn, with my nose nestled into my mother's side."
'Well, you called my father' names a year ago," growled the Wolf, finding another reason.
"I was not born a year ago," said the poor Lamb.
"You can make all the excuses you want," said the Wolf, "but I am hungry, and shall eat you just the same." And without further ado, he gobbled up the little Lamb.
As a tyrant, the Wolf needs no pretext for his tyranny.
No Greater Love
John Mansur heard this story during
The Vietnam War. (This site may be gory.
In invading Iraq, the Bush Administration is blind to the sufferings that War can bring
) ) It was told to him as a fact. Unable to verify it, he said he had known of stranger things happening in the war.
In "A Tale of Two Cities", Sydney Carton sacrificed his life to save another man from the guillotine - “It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known”.
----
Whatever their planned target, the mortar landed in an orphanage run by a missionary group in the small Vietnamese village. The missionaries and one or two children were killed outright, and several more children were wounded, including one young girl, about 8 years old.
People from the village requested medical help from a neighbouring town that had radio contact with the American forces. Finally, an American Navy doctor and nurse arrived in a jeep with only their medical kits. They established that the girl was the most critically injured. Without quick action, she would die of shock and loss of blood.
A transfusion was imperative, and a donor with a matching blood type was required. A quick test showed neither American had the correct type, but several of the uninjured orphans did.
The doctor spoke some pidgin Vietnamese, and the nurse a smattering of high school French. Using that combination, together with much impromptu sign language, they tried to explain to their young frightened audience that unless they could replace some of the girl’s lost blood, she would certainly die. Then they asked if anyone would be willing to give blood to help.
Their request was met with wide-eyed silence. After several long moments, a small hand slowly and waveringly went up. Dropped back down, and then went up again.
“Oh, thank you,” the nurse said in French. “What is your name?”
“Heng,” came the reply.
Heng was quickly laid on a pallet, his arm swabbed with alcohol, and a needle inserted in his vein. Through this order Heng lay stiff and silent.
After a moment, he let out a shuddering sob, quickly covering his face with his free hand.
“Is it hurting, Heng?” the doctor asked. Heng shook his head, but after a few moments another sob escaped, and once more he tried to cover up his crying. Again the doctor asked him if the needle hurt, and again Heng shook his head.
But now his occasional sobs gave way to a steady, silent crying, his eyes screwed tightly shut, his fist in his mouth to stifle his sobs.
The medical team was concerned. Something was obviously very wrong. At this point, a Vietnamese nurse arrived to help. Seeing the little one’s distress, she spoke to him rapidly in Vietnamese, listened to his reply and answered him in a soothing voice.
After a moment, the patient stopped crying and looked questioningly at the Vietnamese nurse. When she nodded, a look of great relief spread over his face.
Glancing up, the nurse said quietly to the Americans. “He though he was dying. He misunderstood you. He though you had asked him to give all his blood so the little girl could live.”
“But why would he be willing to do that?” asked the Navy nurse.
The Vietnamese nurse repeated the question to the little boy, who answered simply, “She’s my friend.”
Greater love has no man than this, that he lay down his life for a friend.
Looking for Longevity?
After lapping up a bowl of soup, a guest at a dinner table exclaimed: “I cannot eat without soup!”.
I don’t know whether that was a compliment to the chef or an insult depending on how you look at it but it certainly betrays a lack of awareness that there there are starving and under-nourished people, like those in North Korea and the African continent, who don't get to eat a decent meal, let alone with or without soup.
Looking for a Life of Longevity? Try the deity MM Diet. But this is only if the food you eat is packed with nutrition. Otherwise, being only 80% full, you'd be 20% under-nourished. Arithmetically speaking.To people who don’t know when or where their next meal is coming from, this formula is a big joke.
Errr.. Excuse me... You a banker?
This is not the first time I come across a presumptuous young punk self-professed as a banker. I should be used to it by now. Neverthelss I still cringe with embarassment for the guy.
Calling oneself a banker is ridiculous unless you own or founded a bank like Wee Cho Yaw. So long as we’re on the bank’s payroll, we are technically bank employees right down to the toilet-cleaners.
The next thing you'd hear is a person calling himself a financier simply because he works in a finance company. In a hotel... a hotelier. In a massage parlour... a physiotherapist. A HDB buyer/seller... a property developer. If I work in Jurong Industrial Area, will that not make me an .... Industrialist?!
B i l l b o a r d s
Billboards you won't see......Or rather Billboards you WILL see in my Yahoo album.
Dog year hur?..
Cute adorable hairy blonde pole dancer!
Then and Now in IT
The second weekend of next month is the IT show at Suntec City. There never has been such a good time to buy systems than now, particularly desktops. Current prices are real peanuts when you think how much you have to fork out in the early years. I reckon what I've spent in aggregate, beginning with an antiquated IBM-compatible, could conservatively buy a 1000 cc car today.
Note-books, however, are still holding firm. They know that people who acquire them can afford it in the first place, and they are more than like expensive toys and status symbols than anything else. I never like note-books. Spec for spec, they can never complete with desktops for ease of use and computing speed.
It has never been so easy nowadays with Windows as the OS. (What many may not realize is that Windows is not truly an OS by itself. It is still dependent on DOS to run in the background, hidden). I remember the exasperation .........
in learning and executing DOS commands, the flimsy floppy disks, the monochrome monitor and the dot-matrix printer emancipating a sound like a dentist is having a drilling session. But the sound of success (of a print-job) was sweet music to one’s ears. That one could do away with the typewriter, make instanous corrections and see your printed page was quite gratifying notwithstanding the tears that Wordstar as a word processor could bring. Thankfully a new programe emerged. WordPerfect. But it was still DOS-based.
We didn't have the ability to drag and drop or the convenience of a dump bin:
What a pity local names like Datamini, ACS, Aris and Ranger have folded up. Too many players in a small market. Datamini was always the first to come up with the best configuration in the market then and abandoned the lead as quickly as they come up with the next. Never buy a Dell thinking you have the best deal in town. They source for the cheapest components or peripherals in the market to put in their desktops and you risk incompatibility like I did even within the warranty period. Their out-sourced after sales service sucks. You'll find you're dealing with an invincible form from cyberspace. Their motto is “We sell only systems”. Go figure out what that means. Looking for good freeware utilities? Loook no further than this cool site.
Finally, the truth behind why some men spend hours net surfing....
"Will you marry me?"
Gone Fishing off the pier!
-----------------------------------
Once upon a time, a guy asked a girl, "Will you marry me?"
The girl said, "NO!"
And the guy lived happily ever after and went playing tennis,
fishing, loafing, and drank a lot of beer -
whenever he wanted.
So that was and still is
the world's shortest and happiest fairy tale.
THE END
ATM Hiccup at POSB
One of the perks of bachelorhood status is that I get to collect 'ang pows' every CNY. This difference this year was that the collection was more and, to remove the temptation of spending it, I went down to POSBank.
The ATM counted the cash and spewed a receipt accordingly. It then proceeded to update my passbook. That done, I retrieved my passbook and pored over it. You can never be too sure. True enough, to my disbelief, the cash transaction wasn't captured!
I re-inserted the passbook and tested other
ATMs nearby to no avail. The next sensible thing to do was refer to the bank within. But it is a Sunday.
The thought of having to turn up at the bank the next day and then seeing a line of people is enough to get me peeved. There’s always a beeline at every
POSB outlet. I don’t know why. Either people have lots of money to put in or lots of money to take out.
Looks like you can’t trust the ATM machines for cash deposits. Notice the big jaws designed to clamp on your money? And why do they have to be so wide? Do people carry huge stacks of notes with them in this era of modern banking? If they do, wouldn't they rather transact with a human being rather than a machine to be safe? Or they are encouraging
depositors to launder their money this way as there's no telling who's who.
"For Whom The Bell Tolls" loud and louder still
The Four Ages of Men
He with body waged a fight
But body won; it walks upright.
Then he struggled with the heart;
Innocence and peace depart.
The he struggled with the mind;
His proud heart he left behind.
Now his wars on God begin;
At stroke of midnight God shall win.
by W.B. Yeats
God shall win ultimately.
I was flipping through the pages of the obituary section. I can’t explain why I did what I normally would have skipped
Wait a minute! No so fast! I thought I just got a glimpse of a familiar face! I flipped back to the page and there it was, his picture! I looked down at the name below, hoping it would not match. But there was not mistaking about it. There were more than one pic of him. You can’t forget a person whose name reads as memorably as ABC.
We were former colleagues in a bank. He moved on; so did I. We all did; the whole lot of us. It would be rare for anyone to stay put at any one place. Then we lost touch. Somehow when poeple go separate ways, friendships fade to nothingness.
It was shocking to learn that he died of a heart attack while in office as chief money dealer. What could have triggered it? Had he any heart problem before? Every heart has its bitterness and its joy. I suspect the management style of his employer aggravated it. (Oh I typed that as “aggregated” earlier. A very nice malapropism.)
A dubious distinction of literally “died standing”. And he was one year shy of 55. Poor chap.
I was on the phone with a former male colleague during the recent CNY holidays and in the course of our conversation, he slipped in: “Do you remember so-and-so, an ex-colleague our ours?
Given the notoriety of the person referred to, it would be difficult to not to.
"She just passed away" he continued in a matter-of-fact tone.
"Really?!” I could barely contain my surprise. After all, the deceased was junior to us in age. “When? How did you learn this?”
“She was a big shot in X bank, wasn’t she?” my friend egged on.
I updated him however unnecessary: “She might have been but her exit from that bank was shrouded in mystery. She might have the gift for gab and the grab for gift. And the higher you are, the greater your fall!”
We both knew tacitly that she wasn’t particularly liked by anyone who had the misfortune to cross path with her. I dare say a fair number of people would be pleased that she be pulled down from her high horse. She doubled up before she was double 5. Perhaps the horse threw her off! "Good grief!" says Charlie Brown.
Death is as causal as birth. It recognises not who you are, Fools or Kings for death is a great leveler .
I once came across a signature line in a tennis website reading somewhat like this: “
Be nice to everyone for you’d never know who you’ll encounter on your way down”.
A Time for Reflection
Is this sunrise or sunset? The optimist in in me says it is sunrise.
Sunrise.. sunset.. swiftly flows the day;
One season following another,
Laden with happiness and tear.(Fiddler on the Roof)
To everything there is a season,
A thing for every purpose under heaven:
A time to weep, at time to laugh,
A time to mourn, and a time to dance- Ecclesiastes
To that, add a season for soul searching.
While young people may anguish over their 30th birthday and try to hide their 40th, it is with the 50th that most start to see themselves as beginning to be old. If this is what researchers are uncovering, than I, nearer to 60th than 50th, must be antiqued. It is with a start that I realize how old I am because I never think about it and now that I do, I ask myself where and how all those years have gone by without my feeling the passage of time. Have I been asleep like Rip Van Winkle?
For those in their 50s, the turn of the last century, more than another other, brings a major reappraisal of the direction one’s life have taken, of one’s priorities and, more particularly, how best to use the remaining years. The 50s is a turning point in the aging process during which people are made to feel their age more acutely than ever, writes a sociologist. However, for Confucius, it was at 50 that he felt he truly understood human nature. The sage attached different meaning and importance to the different stages of his life. He wrote:
"When I was 15, I set my mind on learning;at 30, I held on firmly to what I've learnt; at 40, I knew all about managing affairs and understanding truth;at 50, I realised that Heaven had its mandate and I blamed neither Heaven nor Man.at 60, I could tell whether a man was telling the truth and judge his character by listening to his speech andat 70, I could follow my heart's wishes and not make mistakes."(A little bit like a Frank Sinatra’s song that Robin Williams resurrected in recent times, recounting the stages of a man's life).
Yet, says a psychologist, there is much taboo about examining your life in your 50s. For many, there is a silent despair and a fear of becoming irrelevant in work or marriage with no real alternative in sigh. For those who are able to make vital choices, there is a hard time of personal struggle early in the decade. Readers who are young may not find empathy with what I say. Nevertheless,
"Years from now when you talk about this - and I know you will - be kind" (‘Tea and Sympathy’)
No doubt men and women react differently to aging. Speaking for myself, it may not be rosy but it is certainly not grim by any means. Along with the reflectiveness, there is a feeling of wisdom not known before. I feel freer to enjoy life and, in the liberation, I am able to see a broader view. The psychological crises triggered by reminders, subtle or otherwise about aging, have lost their bite. The true nature of aging is highly subjective and I see the onset of old age not as reaching some specific year of life but the onset of physical impairment, the first undeniable harbinger of old age. It is after all not the years in your life but life in your years that counts.
Going by that criterion, I want to think I am biologically youthful while chronologically mature.
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