One of the heartfelt family pictures and the happiest volunteering project this year.
These are my mother’s village in raising us. At least, four of these people in this picture had once sent me to YPM when I was little. These are ones that survived my teenager years regular crankiness during two years I lived alone in grandma’s house without my family. One of my aunt’s son accompanied me to school in Tebet, from Tomang, before heading to his office in Kelapa Gading, by bus, daily. I was suddenly turned into a spoiled brat while living with them. I can list more but let’s stop here.
When I knew they wanted to perform umrah, but seemed uncertain and unclear about the time and process, I couldn’t help being fussy. To realize any dreams and good intentions, once the money is there, it’s important to execute it asap. Unless, the distraction will always win.
So, I started bugging and nagging telling them I would take care everything and they just had to pay.
This is their very first trip abroad. I enjoyed all the hassles it brings. From registering and sending them for their first passport book, choosing the umrah travel and the package to the smallest detail that cater what they wanted, registering for vaccines and visiting the travel office to do fitting and travel kit pick up, managing payments, to countless whatsapp chats in a dedicated group giving reminders, answering questions, and many more for the past four month. I emptied days in my calendar to accompany them.
Being a shadow agent, the travel agent officer put me in the umroh group chat so I can enjoy the trip too. Couldn’t help being so teary for the past few days looking at all the pictures and videos. One of my aunts called from the hotel in Madinah then we cried together on the phone while laughing happily. She called me again after returning saying how impressed she was with the service during the trip and hoping to return soon.
Being involved and in-charge for my mother’s family umroh plan is truly an honor.
May Allah accept all the worship and prayers, repay all their kindness, and add more blessings to them and their family. Amin.
(When I looked back, a huge part of me become agiver, some credit goes to them).
Few circumstances since last year gave me some lessons in real life regarding to human relationships.
But, only few recent events reminded me of an Adam Grant’s book : Give and Take. He explained the idea in an organizational setting, but actually it can be applicable in any settings of human relationship.
When it comes to relationship with human, more giving doesn’t mean more receiving. Often, the more you give, the less you receive.
Giving depends a lot on the capacity and energy. Giving tells a lot more about the capacity of the giver rather than the taker. When we give something to human and don’t receive the equal amount of what we give, it’s simply because their capacity is not on the level of ours.
Giver operates on a different level than the other two. Their mindset is always about what they can do for others within their power, even many times beyond their power.
The funny thing based on research mentioned in the book : compared to taker and matcher, in any industry tested, giver is a group who earn the least. The last position belongs to giver. Above the giver are taker and matcher, but, here’s the best part, who earned the most and for a long period of time?
It’s giver too.
In the book, what separates the lower rank giver and upper one was self-interest. Selfless givers only think about others and neglect themselves, while otherish givers, along with think about others, they also have a strong sense of self-interest.
Based on this, it’s important to be giver who konws their own limit because taker doesn’t have any. Taker is the worst type of all.
I slowly learn when you deal with taker, you should have a slight degree of matcher mentality. Because no matter what, you can’t give and pour from an empty cup.
The best thing for a giver is dealing with another giver. It reminds me of few relationship I have growing up. I just realized I am mostly matcher in many surface level of relationships, but very much giver in a close knitted group. I think I remember writing this too.
But, even in a close-knitted group, being a giver should be always done with a pinch of salt. Humans have expectations and when it is not met, then something feels uncomfortable and unpleasant. But, we can’t control others. So, it’s ours to learn how to deal with it.
First, understand that what we do and how we deal with others, it reflects more of our capacity, capabilities and characters. Not theirs. This makes sense why being a giver is hard. Giving needs building something inside. It needs thinking.
Second, in spite of being a giver, it’s important to have a certain degree matcher mentality while dealing with takers, who always tend to make everything about themselves. Being a giver with boundaries is personally important.
Human relationship and its complexity always perplexes me.
All the sweetness and savory birthday meals. May she enjoy all these flavors life bring.
I love myself before becoming a mother. I love myself even better as the years go by. It has improved so many aspects of my personal life. It sets my priorities right, improve my time and energy management, and helps me trying to pursue the right goals in life.
In raising her, I keep editing my life and adjusting my direction.
It’s not only about raising a human being to be something in the future, doing specific jobs. It’s more about raising someone who knows who she is, where she came from, and where and to whom she will return.
Putting my best effort into raising a conscious human being with a strong sense of direction in life. So whenever she’s lost, she still knows to whom and where she must return and turn.
Keep improving the work of raising a person with confidence and humility, knowing there will always be The Most Merciful and The Most Powerful to protect her, grant all her heart wishes, and guide her to achieve them. At the same time, she understands where the credit goes for everything she has in life.
A human being who understands the real compass in life is never another human being. Including me, her mother. She is not me and will never be me. So, I hope she’ll find herself, and I sincerely hope she’ll find herself in the right place, doing the right thing,surrounded by the right people.
I hope you live a great life filled with barakah.
Keep your head down to count your many uncountable blessings, Keep your hope high while you ask for your future. Give your best effort and let Allah decide the rest.
Based on personal experiences, endurance to survive and hopefully thrive in doing important things for a long time needs two things : Rhytm and System.
Rhytm, like in music, it keeps the song going in steady beat from the beginning to the end. Kind of rhytm we have is mostly decided by what kind of habits we do. In mental health issues, it starts when one is slowly losing control over their rhytm and they couldn’t reclaim it and pick up themselves.
But, rhytm alone is not enough. We need the melody (and lyrics) to make a song beatiful and meaningful. Drum can’t stand alone without any other melodic instruments.
The next level is about combining everything into one solid form called system. To build a system that works for many areas in life, it starts with having one that works in our personal life. Solid systems outside is the result of solid system inside.
Deciding the rhytm and building system are two that I have been constantly doing unconsciously in many areas of life. Whenever I am in the new setting, I always sit and observe first how I will operate in the new environment.
It explains why the first thing I have done after arrive in new city is tidying up and unpacking right away after returning back. Losing the rhytm is detected as a danger for my system and it makes me can’t function properly.
It explains why I couldn’t survive daily full time job and only lasted for two years and never returned. Spent most of my daily rhytm in other people’s systems doesn’t fit and help me to achieve what I need and want to do in life, if I continued to stay there.
Building the system that works doesn’t happen in an instant. It needs trial and error. What works for some times might not work for another time.
This is actually a very much self reminder after witnessing a lot of changes happening in this year. “Was it this hard at that time?”. Trying to make sense whether I am getting impatient or what.
When things run well, it’s easy to say your system works.But, when it doesn’t, you start questioning whether it’s time to change or you have to wait and see.
A long-term project called life requires constant improvement and attention.
In understanding the relationship between myself and money, I found some patterns :
In personal finance, I have always been loyal and frugal.
In family finance, I have always been royal, love exploring new trials, while keep being rationale.
In bussiness finance, I have been quite royal when it comes to the sustainability of the business, but often playing small when it comes to the expanding the wall.
I see that I behave differently in front of every bank account/card and unconsciously categorize purchases according to which department they belong to. I always try my best to draw a clear line when I choose which bank app/card should I pick to pay for the transaction.
Setting boundaries to others indeed start with setting boundaries to yourself.
This year’s noise has been among the most overwhelming. All in personal, national, and global levels. It feels like having overstimulation inside out.
The brain seems to have taken on too many duties and is unable to stop processing a wide range of circumstances that occur in sequence or simultaneously throughout the year.
Keep trying to make sense of things that happened beyond my shallow comprehension. Try to rationalize the behavior that I thought was impossible to perform by a supposed decent human being.
In another lane, witnessing how a 20-year difference can really pass by, and how it’s really possible for one not to move an inch from where they were. But, things are never static. Things that I call not moving, it is actually moving, but, instead of progressing, they are regressing.
Being 20 years older and regressing without realizing it.
It disturbed me more than I realized. I have been talking to myself about what actually bothers me.
I haven’t figured out the answer but found a similarity in all these examples.
“Learned helplessness is a psychological state where you believe you have no control over what happens to you. This occurs after a person has repeatedly experienced stressful, uncontrollable events, leading to a feeling that your actions don’t matter”.
I understand change is hard. But not until this year did I see what life could be like if we really neglect the homework that should be done, skip the training that should be learned, and keep walking without a compass or clear direction. It could bring you literally anywhere before you realize you’re actually lost. Like you have no idea where you are, and it is a point of no return.
What’s worse, even after you realize it, you still don’t know where to go, because you’ve been accustomed to living a life without thinking for many years.
For someone who often suffers because whose brain couldn’t stop and doing too much thinking, it’s perplexing.
One who is regressing is actually asking the same question as one who is progressing: “How do I end up here?” Only with different tones. One with astonishment, while the other with confusion.
I have been searching for the root of learned helplessness other than stress and trauma. Is it possible because of multiple bad decision-making that keeps compounding? One bad decision-making that is not bothered to be fixed?
The level of thinking greatly influences decision-making, and it requires a certain level of intelligence —the higher, the better? Not really. At a certain point, thinking alone is not enough. It won’t bring you results. Doing and executing are the real work of decision-making.
How do we even know whether a decision is good or bad? Before making it, one that feels harder, seems impossible, and stretches the heart and brain to the maximum to execute is usually a good one.
After living it, we will slowly be shown the result. At this point, is it possible to turn a bad decision to be slightly better one? Possible. But, we have to do the homework. Slightly harder than before, but, the sooner it is realized, the easier to fix. This too needs thinking
Doing and excuting need one ingredient that I didn’t realize I have been having growing up due to many unintentional circumstances that push me to keep exercising it : courage.
I think courage is the cure(?) of learned helplessness. Since it’s learned, it can surely be unlearned. But, courage is not given. It’s practiced through continuous execution.
I also realized how important it is to live with good, honorable, and respectable wants. Not only needs. Not to gain other’s approval, but to respect yourself.
Wants make you think, make you hopeful, make you go out and try, and make you feel alive. While, helplessness is the root of hopelessness. It’s hard to imagine to operate life with such state.
Thinking, doing, and executing is hard. But, the consequences of neglecting them are even harder. Maybe this is why people say life is hard. Neither choice is easy.
Maybe this is also why the Quran keeps repeating certain lines many times :
“Afala ta’kilun?” (don’t you use your intellect?)
“Afala tatafakkarun?”(don’t you think?”)
“Afala yatadabbarun?” (don’t you reflect?”)
The more examples I see, the more I understand how powerful the intellect is.
I have said enough.
One line from Murakami keeps playing inside my head while writing this :
There are three reasons I failed. Not enough training. Not enough training. And not enough training.
Closing this with a line found in Medium :
“Writing is how to make sure your train of thought arrives at the station”.
Things sown during the twenties were slowly and constantly reaped in the forties. Not (just) money, but more like habits, mindset, struggles, and any hard choices made in the 20s start returning the investment in the 40s. At least, it makes life slightly easier than many.
As a parent, I just realized that the training to deal with a certain decade starts a decade before.
Any training done consistently in any decade will compound in the subsequent decades. We really become what we repeat over and over again. The good and the bad. Unless we make the unconscious conscious, it will direct our life, and we call it fate, said Jung.
To be authentically transparent and honest about ourselves, it’s essential to have regular alone time during our youth. To separate from the crowd, to listen closely to your own voice and thoughts, and to think about where we want to go and what we should do to get there. If a man knows not to which port he sails, no wind is favorable, said Seneca. Being able to sit with yourself is a highly underrated skill that many people don’t realize the importance of.
Two hardest ibadah in Islam are two : Shalat and marriage. One that we have to do daily, maintain regularly, and take care of mindfully. Two that if we neglect, the effects won’t show instantly, but slowly, unnoticed, and before we know it, it crashes the entire system. Taking care those two is the foundation of sanity in adults life. Nothing really works if these two don’t.
I really need to break the writing absence by starting small.
Two 15th anniversary for things that have been taking me places, witnessing many of life’s ups and downs.
Adding another two of the things that get through the years with me this month.
You know that anything new that brings us happiness will eventually adapt to a new normal, and it will slowly become our new regular, losing its spark. A book said it takes exactly 87 days for a honeymoon period to come to an end.
It’s called “hedonic adaptation.” Anything that initially brings you joy tends to lose its appeal after 12 weeks. The brain treats your new possessions/ habits/new life like expired milk.
The funny thing is, it’s only applicable for positive things. A negative experience can last for years. Trauma, destructive and painful experiences, doesn’t have an expiry date. We carry that all through the years and can still remember it fresh, no matter how much time has passed.
In such a situation, nothing and no one really makes anyone happy. So what does?
Finding novelty in consistency. The same thing that you treat as something new, periodically, regularly, over and over again.
Surviving, Taking care of, Keep maintaining the excitement, For the same things over long years, that’s the brain job. It requires thinking, not (just) feeling.
A recent event gave me another frown and uttered disbelief. It was another thing that I thought could happen in any random social media post I encountered, but to deal with this in reality, I keep questioning myself: What kind of world is this?
That was one of the passages on my previous post.
I don’t know since when, whenever something happens, something that has a direct or indirect impact on my life, something that I still have to deal with in the future, I have this constant annoyance inside to make sense of everything. Recent events on a personal level have been constantly disturbing and need to make sense.
Like Hermione, when in doubt about something, go to the library. I have been through my old reading for days and went through my gallery, where most of the contents are captured from articles I read in the past. I am also typing some questions in the learning machine. I have certain answers that I keep repeating whenever I discuss the problem with someone. But I am still not satisfied enough to stop wondering.
During sit and stare session in tahajud (this again another 4 am post), I suddenly remember one word I wrote in my latest YPM post. Then my mind jumped to another recent writing on the draft about my daughter who starts copying a certain habit of mine and elaboration of how habit and characters formed. There is also certain pinned post on my feed that I keep re-reading regarding this disturbing event because it amplifies the truth of what I wrote there.
From there, I keep connecting some of the recent conversations, looking back at some of my personal experience and some others related to me, and I start feeling a bit settled.
One phrase that could explain the event :
The absence of internalized values.
Previously, I can only make sense the behavior by calling it weak character. But then, what’s behind such weak characters that lead to certain behavior?
It must be something deeper than that. How does characters are built? Through long years of repetitions of habits. Habits can be good or bad.
Then, how does one build good characters? By doing long years of hard things.
How does habit formed? Internally : from genetics. We bring certain instilled preferences in ourself inherited by genetic from our ancestors. Externally : from our environment.
How does environment help to promote habits? Internally : Motivation and willpower Externally : System.
Some habits we carry in our genes flourish because it grows in the right environment while some failed to thrive because it doesn’t meet the right soil to grow.
I learned that we might not carry any genetics of certain habit, but, environment has enough power to perform certain habits.
Anything we have internally doesn’t really work without working on the external factors. Something that we don’t have internally might grow when there is strong pressure externally.
One of the reasons why certain schools are in high-demand because they provide everything to build good characters. The seeds are different, but with the right environment with good system, it makes bad habits have no place to grow.
So, what drives our attitude and behavior at the most basic level? It’s our beliefs and values. Values and character are deeply interconnected, with one forming the foundation and the other serving as its outward expression. Values are the beliefs and principles that guide a person, while character is the consistent demonstration of those values through behavior and habits over time.
Our core values are usually inherited from our closest people. Parents, teachers, or the bigger family. We pick our initial values from our surroundings.
Based on personal experience and seeing some results when someone becomes a fully mature adult by the end of their 30s and 40s, value transmission needs a strong connection and countless repetitions until it can be safely internalized during our formative years that persists through adulthood.
If it doesn’t take place at home, other circle with stronger connection might take the job. Friends, schools, etc.
“Adolescence is considered a critical period for the development of values and identity, when parents serve as important agents of socialization of their children (Alwin, 1984, Smith and Self, 1980, Starrels, 1992). However, parents compete with other socialization agents (e.g., peers, teachers, and media) such that adolescence marks a turning point when parental influence begins to wane (Younnis & Smollar, 1985). Adolescents begin to remove themselves from their parents’ sphere of influence and expand their own identity and values (Hoffman, 1984, Kroger and Haslett, 1988). The process of individuation accelerates as children experience important life transitions such as moving out of their parents’ home, marrying, and having children of their own, which lead to greater divergence from the values of their parents (Bucx, Raaijmakers, & Van Wel, 2010). Because timing appears to a key feature of value socialization, it is important to consider both pre- and post-adult children when studying the transmission of values between generations (Acock and Bengtson, 1980, Bengtson, 2001, Erikson, 1950, Hitlin, 2006).
Children couldn’t learn from someone who they have no connection with. No education could ever take place without connection. No values could be transferred without a strong connection.
Connection needs presence. They say quality is more important than quantity? Only true with adequate quantity first. No quality before quantity. Numbers can’t lie. Low quantity has a higher probability of low connection.
Can children from the same home and parents end up with different values? It’s very much possible. The child’s temperament, birth order, family situation, schools they attend, and things they experience growing up might all contribute to different values adopted.
How do we judge successfully transmitted values?
It’s how people behave when they have full authority over themselves. Things they do when they have all the resources on their hand. Things they do behind supervision and closed door.
The core values will also have an impact on ethics and morals.
Any behaviors an adult displays is the reflection of successful values that he adopted. Whether from home or another environment.
There is one memorable line from the current podcast I listened to from a marriage counselor :
“Value is not taught, it’s caught”.
(Deep breath)
An adult without clear values will never have clear goals in life. It is translated in every aspect of life. Living in confusion, picking up the easiest way to live, driving aimlessly until it crashes into something, the consequences of which must be handled not only by himself, but unfortunately, by others too.
Adults with unclear values even unable to internalize and own their mistake properly and do something to fix it the right way.
I never knew how scary it is before it truly happens before my eyes.
(Deep breath).
It took me few hours to finally finish this writing with countless revisions.
I think I can put my mind on ease a little bit now.
The past few days have been intense and feel like out of this world.
The chaos happens inside out.
Life, as I know it, has never been easy. But, previously, I felt like mine was the only one that was hard, while others seemed had it easy and strangely, I considered it was normal.
But the past few days, as a citizen of this country, we have been exposed to the ugliest realities that seemed to absurd to understand. It feels like living in different parallel worlds.
What makes it even more confusing, this also happened on personal level. The past few months,I have been dealing with something that I thought I could only read and see as something happened to others, but dealing with it first hand, it’s hard to explain that it is real.
Recent event gave another frowned and uttered disbelief. Another thing that I thought could happen in any random social media posts I encountered, but, to really deal with tbis in reality, I keep questioning myself : what kind of world is this?
Those tranquil days seemed so far during this period. Is it what those Palestinians feel daily for almost two years? Like there’s no predictability that makes you feel safe and secure.
How we call it live?
I currently experience the curse of knowledge, the consequences of noticing too much and intense, and the downside of being a long term thinker. At times like this, absorbing too much create some burden. Funny there are always indeed two sides of something.
At times like this, what I need is more detachment. Less instead of more.
Caring too much is exhausting. At times like this, certain amount ignorance is indeed a bliss.
This is not a 4 am post, but another written in the dark one while having a bit of trouble getting sleep and I desperately need throwing a short rant into the void.
A Penny for My Pensieve 