Gardening

The front door of my house is facing west. As the sunlight is fearful in the afternoon, it gets a lot of deterioration due to the strong sun ray. Ever since the completion of my house's renovation, I decided to make sure that the front door of my house is not been badly affected again.

Many ideas came and went but eventually, I settled to establish a mini garden in front of my house. When the idea was settled in my mind, I announced it to my family members, there is no strong objection but had also left all the works to me.

I started with the money plant and today it had grown into a beauty as below:


Simple daily maintenance and care of about 15 minutes like watering the plants, spraying the leaves with water to make them looks lively and clearing dried leaves are necessary routine to keep the plants at tip top condition. The good feeling during these times especially among the green and seeing them growing day by day can only be experienced.

Monthly feeding of fertilizers, plants trimming, transferring plants to bigger pots can sometimes consume up to an hour or two. During my shopping trips, the flora departments or flower shops are additional stops that had been included. In these places, I can learn more ways of planting from the florists or other plants lovers. I also regularly served the internet for more planting tips.

Socially, gardening had allowed me to broaden my green circle of friends who likes plants. We talk about these green plants, procedures of care and handling, how to procreate them, exchange pots of plants among us and enjoy our fruits of labour together.

After I had started this mini garden, my visit to the Singapore Botanical Garden takes a new perspective and dimension. I looked out for and started to enjoy nice views of plants and flowers in the nature. The nature of these different plants and flowers are so amazing and pleasing to look at.

For me, the appreciation of the beauty of gardening had started with just trying to shield my front door from damage to admiring nature and their beauties. Precisely, as my front door is facing west, the plants gets a lot of strong sunlight and grew rapidly. As these plants grew, they created a shade for my front door.

It is just so amazing to be able to live to appreciate the green natural environment right at your door step resulted from time spent on manual hands work, determination, commitment and perseverance. I am also extremely happy and glad to be able to see the plants growing day by day from my patience care and touch. The process of witnessing their daily growth had been fulfilling and had lightened up my whole life. I am always looking forward to see them every morning before I set off to work.

Some of the plants that I am admiring daily:

Life Long Learning

I just like to learn and as there were always choices, priority and limited times for what to learn, I chose wisely to avoid missing any opportunities.

When I was small during childhood, I leave in a kampong in Lorong Koo Chye and my neighbours were Teochiew. I played with them daily and as I needed to converse with them in their dialect, I took up the opportunity to learn from them. I remember their 84 year old grandmother was kind, gentle and willingly to guide and teach me patiently. Presently, my ability in speaking Teochiew has diminished but whenever opportunities arises to revise and practice, I will be able to at least converse well again.

I learned the bargaining technique from my mother. For the first few encounters during those bargaining session, I felt a kind of awkward and shy but she can be insistent, persuasive, patience and even endure sarcastic remarks thrown at her. All her bargaining effort was to save as much possible given the very poor financial situation when I was young. Currently, I still used those techniques whenever there is opportunity and I also used these skills for corporate encounters.

Being born into a traditional Hokkien family, mum’s skill of making of rice dumpling was passed down from her parents. I was fascinated how she could make such delicious rice dumpling and made my commitment to learn from her. One of the most difficult skill of making rice dumpling is the tying of the dumpling. A beautiful rice dumpling must be tied well to contain the rice and ingredients and looks well. My skill in tying rice dumpling had often passed her litmus test and would often help her when opportunities arises.

My dad had a bicycle that he used to ride all he way from Lorong Koo Chye in Upper Paya Lebar Road to his company in Telok Ayer Street in Shenton Way just to save on bus fare. After he had met with the accident at his workplace, resulted in his left leg being amputated at the knee, the bicycle was left to idle. I wanted to learn cycling at that time of age 10, but Dad was reluctant. I had to persuade him to allow me to use his bicycle. The bicycle was huge, meant for adult but I just wanted to try. Obviously, Dad was concerned of injuries while learning and being disabled, he was not in the capacity to teach me. I had to convince him time and again and he reluctantly allowed me but not without worrying for me. I promised him to be very careful with my practice and learned the skill with just minor bruises. This experience had served me well later in life when I had the opportunity to teach my two sons in cycling.

In my previous entry to my blog, I have a detail account of how I came to learn swimming. Through National Service and self improvement pressures, I pushed myself to learn. Every opportunity was hardness to practice and learned. After attaining a certain competency in swimming, I starting teaching my siblings and close friends to swim and the lack in life saving skills was haunting me during those lessons. I felt incompetent and when I had the opportunity to take up life saving skills in swimming during my undergraduate days in university , I jumped at it. After the life saving course, I felt very confident when teaching swimming to those who wanted to learn.

I was working 3 rotating shift regardless of the day in Pasir Panjang Power Station after National Service. This means that I may be off during weekdays with no activities as most of friends were working. To fulfill my learning appetite, I began to search for courses to attend. At that moment, I had class 3 driving license which qualifies me to drive a car but I did not own one and had not been driving. I was contemplating to rent a car to practice driving and for leisure but another idea hit me when I had a chat with my colleague.

He challenged me to take up class 4 & 5 driving license test. This means that I will have my driving practice and earned two more licenses but the challenge was to drive bigger vehicles on lorry and crane. For class 4, testing was on an air-con, hydraulic steering lorry which was quite comfortable. As for the class 5, it was in a crane. Not only it was without hydraulic steering, no air-con and yet you had to maneuver the heavy vehicle using double clutching. Most of the time, I was always sweating during training and sometimes you had to steer until you were force to stand up as the weight of the vehicle and turning situation of the maneuver caused the steering wheel to be tight and heavy.

I took up the challenge in 1984 and passed the class 4 driving in two attempts and class 5 in three attempts.

I will still keep on learning whenever opportunities arise. Sometimes, several opportunities can appear at the same time. In those instances, one has to prioritize and choose the best one to learn. For some who are able to cope well, they can learn several skills or lessons at the same time. One has to determine the best combination for learning.

Excuses

Quote:

Excuses are the nails used to build a house of failure. ~Don Wilder and Bill Rechin

Excuses are what we tell ourselves to avoid dealing with unpleasant truths. As long as we keep entertaining these excuses, we will never face and deal with the real issues or problems. An important step in personal growth is to uproot excuse-making with consciousness and courage and confront the real issues.
We tend to make excuses to avoid appropriate and good suggestions and more often than not, ending the route of our impending success.

Most excuses use negative ideas, thoughts, words or phrases to degrade or degenerate oneself which resulted in not moving forward. Excuses are getaway one tells oneself for not good enough to do the task and therefore there is no need even to try. The fact is that if one did not even tried, how does one knows that he/she is competent? Prolong negative thoughts and actions always lead to disastrous outcomes.

Some of the most common excuses and their underlying truths:

Don’t have enough time.

We often heard this excuse but the actual truth is that there is always time for activities you want to do or must do. These activities can includes going for exercise, built better relationships with your siblings or children, taking up community service etc.

Many other people are happily doing all these activities and the difference is that they have made no excuses but have given priority, commitment and leverage a high level of importance to these activities. Needless to predict, they will face success in their endeavor.

People using excuses for not exercising are really saying that exercise simply isn’t important to them. It’s easier to give the excuse of lack of time, but the real problem is a lack of will.

I don’t know how.

This is the easier excuse to give because if one does not know how to do, then one does not have to do. The truth behind “I don’t know how” is “I’m unwilling to learn.” In other words, you have to admit that you’re lazy.

Don’t let excuses run your life. If you catch yourself using excuses, immediately replace it with a statement of the real truth. At first, that truth may seem uncomfortable and excuses seem to be tempting, but when you start facing the truth, you’ll have the opportunity to grow. For example, if you face your unwillingness to learn, you may decide that even though it would be a lot of hard work to learn a new skill, you still insisted on doing it as you wanted it badly enough to commit yourself to learning it.

Using excuses on external, uncontrollable factors such as lack of time, information, or resources on our failure always lead to not solving our underlying problems because those factors aren’t under our direct control. We need to put aside our excuses and look for genuine causes that we can control. What we can control, we can improve.

We can’t control time, but we can control how we prioritize the actions that fill that time. We can’t control information, but we can choose what to learn as well as how much effort we devote to learning. So by controlling the factors that are within our control, we can have time used wisely, gather information and all the resources we desire.

Classical example: Waking up in the morning….

We always give ourselves excuse especially early in the morning when it is cooling to carry on sleeping instead of waking up immediately to go for exercise. It takes a steel of discipline to push oneself out of bed. Most of the time, when the alarm clock rings, we usually tends just to slap it down and thought that we will wake up five minutes later. The five minutes delayed usually ended up half to one hour later. The trick is to wake up immediately after the alarm rings and there will be no more excuse or issue of not waking up on time. Studies have indicated that it will take 21 days to form a habit and if it is your choice to wake up on time, start practicing today!

Counselling

I was born into a normal family with Dad, Mum, 3 sisters and younger brother. Life was normal and ordinary until my Dad met with an accident at his workplace, resulted in his left leg being amputated at the knee. I was eleven years old then and in Primary 5.

Thereafter, life was hard. With the condition running into my teenage life, I chose to study in the Polytechnic instead of the junior college as I felt that my industrial and economical worth would be better even if I could not make it to the university.

Being introvert during the secondary school days, I began to open up when I entered the Polytechnic and participated as a member of the Engineering Society. The society was managed all by students in the Polytechnic. I was well recognized for my effort and contributions towards the society and was sponsored by the society for a leadership course at the National Youth Leadership Institute.

During that 25 days’ course, my whole life began to open up. Not only I was trained on self confident, leadership and motivation, counseling was also part of course.

After the course, I started to apply what I had learned to organize activities for members of the Engineering Society. One of the activities organized was a hike in Pulau Tekong over the weekend for 200 freshmen in 1977. The knowledge of leadership and counseling came into play as I started to motivate, encourage and support my fellow schoolmates to join us in our self believed goals and direction. It was very fun thing to do then and I was very pleased, contended and satisfied when all the freshmen gave good feedbacks about how they had enjoyed the trip.

During my national service, I was posted as an instructor to the School of Basic Military Training. Even though in the military, discipline is the key factor to drive whatever needs to be done, occasionally, motivation techniques came in very handy when situations demanded.

One of the most recent encountered of counselling was with my final year students at the Polytechnic doing their final year project. Students with underlining problems exhibit behavioural pattern namely apathy, lateness, ill discipline, no respect for authority etc

Motivating them was a bigger task than the project itself. I could safely state that I saw their motivation came back after 17 weeks of hard work and counselling. Currently, they have the highest respect for me not because I am their supervisor or lecturer but I have earned them.

Real cases but students’ names were changed to keep confidentiality:

Student Ken was appointed the project leader by the team. As usual, he did not performed well in the first few weeks. He even acknowledged that he had been slacking given the fact that all his team members were slacking.

Being the first student in my target for motivation, he began to confide to me about his problems after weeks of small talks with him to gain his confidence. He had problems communicate with his parents and was very bothered. We spent hours together talking about his problems and develop solutions together for him using some of my previous experiences. Combining his effort, he had since been able to communicate well with his mother and will be working on his father. He also displayed a very positive attitude after that.

Another student, Levin was totally not interested in his work in the beginning and would come for the weekly project meetings, treating it as a pastime. I noticed that he was very quiet, kept to himself and had not been socializing with his team mates. He always had no confident in his work and always need confirmation to affirm his decisions. He had been behaving in this way until his group members started to protest against him after 16 weeks together.

From then, he was assigned to set up the Programmable Logic Control (PLC) circuits but he did not know how to do it and had no initiative to seek help. I had given him countless times of verbal warning and two email warning letters. My last stroke of patient ran out and I gave him an official warning.

At that time, I realised from his Care Person that he was actually a reinstated student and his bad academic performance had been related to his mother’s passing on due to cancer in 2005. He had been wondering why these things had to happen to him and had always in denial and depression.

Upon realizing, I immediately talked to him to try to get him out the situation and he was crying during our discussion. I knew that after my emotional talk to him, he had come to terms with his mother’s death and he will continue to move on in life positively. He had even promised me to tell his mother that he will start his life anew at her grave.

The next day, when he came to the Polytechnic, I knew that he was a change man with his cheerful expression and positive attitude. What a relief!

I want to give thanks to the opportunities given to me to be able to use my acquired counselling skills to help others having problems or in distress.

Discipline

Discipline is always needed in a successful life.

Discipline drives the way you live your life, directs your emotions, regulate your relationship with others and maintain your mental and physical health.

If you are discipline enough to wake up an hour early every morning, then this extra one hour can be used for many gains in your life eg exercising to improve your health, execute planning for the day etc. Similarly, you must be disciplined enough to do the right requirement of physical exercise and not to over do it.

In financial aspect of your life, one must be disciplined enough to spend within one’s means. You can always be disciplined enough to encourage yourself to be happy with just simple things around you without letting envy of high value products disturb your simple taste.

Good discipline also involves regular fixed time for food, sleep, relaxation and enjoyment.

It is well known that an average person needs 8 hours of sleep per night. It is also known that the liver starts to recuperate and release toxin between 11pm to 2am and so our body should be disciplined and scheduled to sleep 2 hours before that. Of cause, those with health problems should be disciplined enough to have a good and longer rest to allow the body to recuperate. Allowing the body to rest is a basic discipline everyone must adopt daily so that the body can perform well for the day and the rest of our lives.

Plain water serves the best liquid to quench our thirst. Every body should drink an average of 8 glasses daily and the volume of water can included other forms of liquid intake eg soup, juice from fruits like water melon, beverages etc.

For food, I have recently discovered that fruits should be eaten 1/2 hour prior to soup and the main meals ie rice and dishes. In such practice, fruits will dissolve first as solid food take longer to dissolve.

Although discipline do wonder for everyone, over discipline can result in self damaging, destruction and lead to poor stage of health. When over disciplined, it may lead to deprivation, restriction and pushing too hard on ourselves. One should maintain balance on discipline and enjoy to live life to the fullest.