Then and now

Watching the children mature and the grandchildren growing up one cant help but see the difference between now and our time.To see the children work its apparent that they go through a lot of stress and are expected to deliver all the time. Probably part of the reason is that they live and work in KL with its perennial traffic jams and hectic lifestyle.We were fortunate to start working life in the sleepy hollow of Teluk Intan which might have made us a little laid back but we were happy and had time on our hands for the children and ourselves. This leads to the tale of the grizzly old man lying on his death bed and as his life ebbed away he started to mumble alot and one of the things he said"I have one regret in life .I spent so much time trying to make it in life and then when its too late I realize I forgot to live "Food for thought indeed .You will never imagine how fast time flies and before you know it your children and grandchildren are grown up and when that happens they have little time for you.In the meantime as they grow up you become older and perhaps this is the time you need them but sad to say the time allocated for you and them has lapsed and you can only regret. Today looking at the young people work and live their lives I cant help but think that in our time we had a better life and more time and less stress .Inevitably comes the question " In the chase for materialism is it worth it that in the process we lose ourselves ? You may make a lot of money but at the end of the day may find that all this money goes back to trying to repurchase your health .Young people today go through so much stress that you feel that they have become zombies, sleeping without resting, eating without tasting and going through the motions of life without hitting the " Pause " button.They have actually become slaves of their work and there is practically no life. Rushing , grumbling , nagging , tantrums have become the unfortunate side effects .Sometimes we need to strike a balance in the way we live our lives.Life is about choices and we should really take a step back all look at the choices we have in order to live a better life. There are of course certain things that we cannot change like the conditions of our work, the place we work but surely if we look hard enough we can find some variables which are changeable and we must be able to make such changes so that at the end of the day we can live a better life. Living life is never easy and living a happy life is even more difficult but we have to really look at everything in its proper perspective so that somehow we can learn how to live.