Tag: appreciation

  • Inspired by Death

    When faced with the realisation of the finite nature of time, and by extension, life, it seems superfluous to be in search of inspiration to do that which I feel passionate about. Of all the day dreams and fairy tales that dot my imagination from my earliest memories, wanting to change the world was almost always a consistent theme, sometimes on a small scale, and at times in a much bolder way.

    I lack the patience to simply outgrow things because that implies a natural evolution of my being rather than an intelligent effort. Waiting for situations to change simply because with the passage of time it is likely to change is about as inspiring and meaningful as watching paint dry. Worse still, it holds the same sense of fulfillment as the act of counting the grains of sand in the desert. The remembrance of both the inevitability of death as well as the very finite limit it sets on our lives, often without warning, should be enough to spur me into action against every thought that I conceive without the need for any other motivator or source of inspiration. But it doesn’t. At least not as often as it should.

    The main reason I’ve always receded was because I saw no reason to proceed. An obvious statement with not so obvious implications. While the thought of death may spur me into action, it rarely has the same effect on those around me which frustrates me. That frustration is more reflective of my self-criticism of not being able to convey the urgency of life to those around me, and less about my contempt for their waste of life. So my choice to recede is because in the face of an unreceptive audience, any performance no matter how brilliant, is futile. So just as we need receptive hearts to inspire us to want to share a message, the absence thereof causes the words to dissipate into the lethargy around us.

    I sometimes grow impatient and aggressive when I’ve exhausted all reasonable measures to get through to someone that is blatantly destructive or oblivious to how they’re undermining their own potential, but once that final expression of exasperation is spent, the acceptance of it all descends and I move on to focus on more meaningful endeavours. Anything that holds the promise of fulfilment, not necessarily reward, is enough to engage my senses and pique my interest.

    I’ve often been accused of being obsessive with taunts of OCD hurled at me on many occasions, often cloaked as a joke. But my obsession is one that this world could use more of. My obsession is that I wish to leave every situation or every place in a better state than it was before I touched it. The net effect of my life must be more than just an accumulation of comforts and wealth, or a fulfillment of responsibility. It must extend to the upliftment of those around me, including myself.

    For this reason death inspires me. It inspires me because with each skill that I acquire, I feel a compelling need to use it to benefit another before the breath is removed from me and the skill is wasted. It will be wasted if it was neither used to benefit others, nor passed on as a gift to empower another. So before death reaches me, I hope to expend myself in ways that will leave as little wastage as possible for death to claim.

  • If Wishes Were Horses…

    I was reminded of that old proverb tonight. If wishes were horses, beggars would be riders. That’s how it often feels for me in life. Fortunately these bouts of wishing for what never was usually subsides within minutes, and rarely does it ever extend into hours or days. But that I wish or yearn for beginnings that were not intended for my life is something I can’t deny. Most of all, I often find myself wishing that I had sources of wisdom to draw on as I progressed through my years and my life experiences.

    Becoming an adult in a harsh world is difficult enough without such guidance. Finding your way amidst the jeers and ridicule of many while maintaining a single-minded focus on what you aspire to be is enough to try the tenacity of an angel. But I’m no angel, and fortunately the realisation of that struggle only hit me much later in life, well beyond that exhausting stage which made it somewhat more bearable. Perhaps that is the blessing of being oblivious at times.

    However, such struggles are never to be presented in single item purchases. They always seem to come in bulk purchases. Reflecting on those early years seems almost as if I had an idyllic existence at the time if I were to compare it to what was to follow. Painful lessons were learnt in my efforts to become a husband, and later a father. I’ve often felt twinges of remorse and guilt at the thought of the pain unleashed on others during those years of growth, but my saving grace is the knowledge that whatever I did, I did sincerely and out of genuine conviction for what I believed to be the right thing to do at the time. That’s all we can expect from anyone, isn’t it?

    Behaving maliciously is a sign of an infinitely more troubled soul than mine and I shudder at the thought, so as long as I don’t stoop to such levels, I guess I can take comfort in the fact that I am not truly jaded or bitter yet. The cynicism though, is open for debate. The wisdom accumulated through years of unaided struggles can easily be wasted if we’re quick to assume that we were being punished, rather than being educated. Without such trials, mediocrity and fragility would have taken me in a sweeping motion to a place that would have seen me dependent and needy of support structures reserved for the frail of heart, and timid of mind. Yet from a young age the innate resilience of my spirit kept me going. It has always been a sense of resilience that I could never take credit for. I did not sow it, nor did I nurture it. In fact, it nurtured me.

    And now, after all these experiences that have shaped me into who I am today, I still feel lacking. I wonder if the weight of being independently resilient with nothing more than faith to rely on will eventually wear away at my resolve and render me brittle and fragile at a time when the weight of this life just becomes overwhelmingly burdensome. Faith must remain my companion if I hope to survive this ordeal of life with any measure of dignity that may remain. My greatest fear is that at some point I may be faced with the harsh reality that perhaps I got it wrong all these years. Perhaps after all my resolve, my self-proclaimed philosophies of life, and death, and my supposedly informed perspectives of what makes us human, and what gives life purpose, perhaps at some point I will be disemboweled by the truth of what was, and the realisation of how far off the mark I was. And suddenly, the reality of death and the purpose of life will seem like a story very different to the one I just lived, with barely a breath left in me to try again.

  • Managers, Leaders, and Collaboration

    Rather than quote case studies on this, I prefer to share a few random thoughts on what has proven to be effective for me and the teams that I have worked with. To unlock collaboration, you must abandon team meetings. It might sound counter-intuitive, but it works.

    Setting up regular meetings (like the ones that generally set the tone in most projects) run according to the text books of ‘best’ practices, sets the expectation that collaboration beyond your immediate accountability is constrained to only that time set aside for the meeting. When we provide structure beyond just delegations of authority, or accountability for delivery, we hinder performance and encourage individualistic approaches to dealing with problems facing a project, or a team. In other words, we inadvertently push the agenda of the hero rather than the team and we create the perfect climate and culture in which heroes thrive. Getting recognition for your efforts in a team setting of the type described here is a further catalyst to encourage lone-ranger behaviour rather than creating an environment conducive towards collaboration.

    Leadership by facilitation is a powerful skill that can unlock potential in teams and individuals in ways that no amount of coaching or mentoring will be able to equal. The reason why this is seldom practiced is because most leaders are managers first, before they are leaders. In more than two years of running a software testing team, among other functions, we have yet to have a real team meeting. Even when we had ‘team meetings’, it was ad hoc and focused on a specific concern or issue of alignment that needed to be addressed, rather than having a team meeting for the sake of meeting with the team. Regular informal interaction between team members that is focused on clearly defined objectives always yields much better results than dictating who is responsible for what. How often haven’t you seen bright individuals recede simply because they felt overwhelmed by the heroes and bullies in the team?

    Consider this. When you have a team meeting, the agenda usually includes items focused on providing feedback on outstanding actions, allocating new issues to someone for resolution/action, or providing general feedback to staff about what has transpired since the last meeting. All those agenda items confirm only one thing to me. Team meetings are focused on the allocation of individual responsibilities rather than team goals, but are disguised to look as if it’s a team effort that is taking place. To prove this, look around the table at your next meeting and see how many people adopt a sheepish grin when asked about whether or not they read the minutes from the last meeting?

    The moment we avoid establishing routine interactions, we set the scene for spontaneity. I work with various guiding principles in mind that inform the way I engage with others. One of it states that every individual is competent until proven otherwise. Another says that every individual is a mature adult until proven wrong. And yet another favourite is that every individual has an innate need to be recognised for their contribution while being allowed sufficient latitude to employ their personal flair of creativity in the way they arrive at the set objectives. These principles always foster a culture of mutual respect, accountability, and transparency. People clam up and become territorial when they feel like their significance is threatened or questioned. That significance is often challenged if they have reason to believe that their competence is being doubted or questioned.

    More often than not we don’t directly challenge anyone’s significance or competence, but the way in which we trust them, guide them, allow them to act independently, and respect the delegation of authority that we provide them with, collectively reveals how seriously we consider their input or their contribution. You’ll never be able to engage in a meaningful way if you’re managing by team meetings, because just as that sets the expectation for team members to primarily be accountable to that forum, it also sets the expectation that the manager of that team is only expected to engage meaningfully during that session as well.

    The more I try to isolate collaboration and aspects relating to leadership, the more they seem to become intertwined, and perhaps in that there is much truth as well. A manager will be prone to taking a rigid approach towards managing the outputs of a team if that is the limit of their confidence in being able to command the respect and commitment from the team. A leader on the other hand will feel much more inclined to trust, and provide principled leadership that encourages individual-level collaboration and accountability that align with the project or organisational objectives, without feeling a need to enforce their idea of how those objectives should be reached.

    There is an inherent desire in every one of us to want to contribute to a greater purpose. A leader will demonstrate, and therefore share their passion for the organisational goals which in turn will inspire their subjects to aspire to contribute towards the stated goals. However, a manager will assume the role of defining the individual components required to achieve that goal, and will subsequently delegate accountability for those components and then simply expect compliance in the achievement of those goals.

  • Why Time Travel is Probably Not Possible

    The concept of time travel, in my opinion, is more a desire founded in the weakness of us because of our collective regret over missed opportunities rather than a practical and needed solution to any of mankind’s ills. We struggle to live in  the present, to be conscious, and to be grounded because of the constant distraction of what we have yet to do or achieve, which makes it quite ironical that one of those distractions is our pursuit of the ability to travel back in time so that we can right the wrongs we spawned when wondering about some other time or place.

    The more I contemplate the concept of time travel from a purely logical perspective, the less likely the possibility of achieving it appears to be. There are a number of theories that abound by respected scientists that suggest that it is physically possible, but they remain theories, and hence what prompted me to develop my own theories to disprove this misconception that serves as nothing more than a fairy tale.

    I find it difficult to believe that we’ll ever be able to travel faster than instantaneous. What I mean is, we may be able to break barrier of the speed of light, but in doing so, we will only ever get as close as is humanly possible to moving from one place to another in an instant, or moment, or split second, however you wish to measure it; but we’ll never get there before we’ve left our point of departure.

    The entire concept of the speed of light being the holy grail for time travel is mistaken. We assume that simply because the light reflected off an object has not reached us yet, it means that it exists in a different dimension. It doesn’t. The fact that the light is still en route does not change the fact that the object is still physically in the same location. Stated differently, if I were to accelerate faster than the speed of light, chances are that I will find myself in a place of darkness because the light that I left behind is still catching up with me. Imagine the disappointment on the face of the man that eventually breaks the speed of light only to find himself bumping into objects that he can’t see because the light reflected off them has not reached him yet?

    In fact, even in that scenario there are flaws. That would assume that the objects whose reflected light can no longer be seen are all located in close proximity to the origin of his travels. Think about it this way. If I were to travel faster than the speed of light in a horizontal direction, only light emanating from sources in a similar trajectory (so to speak) would be left behind. However, and light traveling vertically would still reach me because I would be crossing their paths and not traveling away from them. So in order for me to reach that point of darkness, I would need to be traveling away from every light source in every direction simultaneously, or else I’ll always be crashing into other light sources.

    That all sounds really complicated so perhaps here is an easier way to explain my point of view. Traveling faster than the speed of light will only make me outrun the light itself, and will not make me travel through time, since time itself is not even measured by the presence or quantity of light. Time is simply a constructed unit of measure that is independent of our definition of it. We could call it 50 other names and define 100 different units of measure to measure it as opposed to the standard seconds, minutes, hours, days, and so on, but it would not change the very essence of time itself.

    Whether or not the light of an object is visible does not stop the entropy experienced by the object. In other words, I won’t remain forever young if I simply lived in a dark room all my life. So the fact that the light that should otherwise be reflected from my body is not visible, does not make me absent. It simply makes me out of sight but still present. So this entire focus on the speed of light to make time travel possible is simply absurd. We measure changes by the elapsed time of the event. We improve our productivity by more meaningfully using the time we have available. And then we delude ourselves into believing that we’re getting better at time management, when in fact we’re getting better at managing our lethargy and procrastination.

    Time is not what we need to conquer, but rather ourselves, our arrogance, and our pride that suggests that we’re so powerful and infinitely resourceful that we have the wit, the intelligence, and the capability to conquer any physical construct we find in our path. Time is not physical. It is not a liquid, a gas, a solid, or any other variation of matter in between. In fact, it’s not even matter, and doesn’t matter either. It’s the actions we do in the moments that pass that determine how well those moments were spent. When we lose sight of that, we end up trying to find ways to escape the reality of death by believing that we are capable of cheating it, starting yet another cycle of lethargy and procrastination to do that which matters, while falsely assuming that we’re engaged in endeavours that will improve the quality of life of mankind.

  • No Forever Afters

    It’s natural sometimes to feel fear when life suddenly takes a turn for the better,  because a history of disappointment or challenges conditions us to expect the worst.  So instead of embracing our new experiences,  we end up bracing ourselves for what we expect might happen.  It’s part of our survival instinct. However, because we’re protecting ourselves from a threat that is not present,  our body takes strain because of the imbalance it causes, which results in poor health and dysfunction. Unfortunately, at that point, the ill health causes us to turn to the modern medical professional first, instead of last.

    You see, when we have this imbalance that causes ill health, we’re conditioned to believe that something external to us has suddenly created an internal problem. A problem that we’re incapable of rectifying unless we bombard our bodies with chemical cocktails that will strip the paint off the wall if applied correctly. But tonight I don’t quite care about the stupidity of current mainstream health regimens. I don’t quite care for much at all actually.

    For some time now I’ve looked around and realised that no matter how much effort or expense is invested in the maintenance and upkeep of the structures around us, the moment that effort is complete, the decay starts setting in to prepare us for the next bout of maintenance. Everything in this world, including us, was designed to perish, to decay, to disintegrate into nothing at the end of being something. It’s a fruitless endeavour to focus on embellishing this world, or this life, but the fickleness of my nature always distracts me towards enticing challenges that lure me towards them under the pretence of it being an expression of my creativity, or in other cases, an opportunity to make the lives of others more comfortable or pleasant.

    Nothing lasts, not the intensity of the emotions felt when love is most inflamed, nor the bitter anger of the betrayal of that same love when it fades. It all dissolves into nothing as time erodes its memory, but yet we pursue the concept of forever after as if it was truly experienced in this world. It never was, and never will be. There are no forever afters, nor are there any fail safe remedies to outlast this world. All we can ever do is delay the inevitable, but the inevitable is inevitable, or else it would not be called the inevitable, yet, inevitably, we seem not to get it. It really is as absurd as that sounded.

    I know that I should be taking the lighter load for the road ahead. I know that the lighter load means less indulgences in materialism, and more in spiritualism. I also know that finishing my latest gardening project adds to that load, but my obstinacy, or perhaps my weakness, is that it is easier to feed my feeble sense of self-worth through accomplishing these celebrated goals, rather than to draw comfort from the fact that I would have successfully detached myself from this world a little more when I walked past that beautiful water feature without reaching to see if my credit card was in my wallet.

    This same weakness within me is what I despise in others. I often despise it even more because being surrounded with a similar weakness leaves me without a handhold to lift myself out of the quagmire of materialism. Living comfortably is a lie. A horrible lie that is unachievable. By our very nature we will constantly seek to improve what we have because that is the yardstick of success. Only those whose primary focus is a goal external to their immediate circle of influence or responsibility will stand any chance of overcoming such a weakness. Unfortunately such philanthropic or altruistic endeavours are also plagued with indulgence of the spiritual self because of our need to be acknowledged and validated.

    This world cannot come to an end soon enough.

  • Licensed to Drive

    Most people can relate to an analogy about cars, so here’s one relating to mental health that I thought would be able to demonstrate my point about the main stream approach to dealing with depression and other so-called mental illnesses (hopefully you have the patience to read it to the end).

    Imagine that the accelerator pedal of the car is your ability to express positive emotions, and the brake pedal was negative emotions, and you are the driver. One day, while driving along minding your own business you get hit by another driver that wasn’t paying attention. The crash isn’t serious enough to write off your car, but it did cause problems with your accelerator and your brake system. More than this, there was some damage done to your car’s appearance.

    So off you went and replaced some of the damaged parts, did some repairs on those parts that couldn’t be replaced, and gave it a coat of spray that made it look just like new again. Only, it wasn’t new, because you knew how much went into getting the outside to look perfect again, while under the paint work, you knew how many wrinkles and scratches were covered up. But everyone told you how great the car looked again, so you ignored the defects and made a point of getting back into your car to get to all the places you wanted to go.

    However, you didn’t do such a good job of the accelerator and the brake pedal. At times, the brakes would feel spongy and unreliable, so whenever you needed to use it, you doubted, until eventually the doubt grew so strong that you started driving slower than ever to avoid using it at all. Then you realises that the accelerator doesn’t feel the way it used to either. It used to feel firm and responsive, almost as decisive as you were, and it used to cause the car to lunge forward when you needed to, and to just cruise when it felt good to do so as well. But now, the accelerator was also unpredictable. At times it would accelerate beautifully, but without warning, the car would slow down almost to a halt for no reason. No matter how much you wanted it to move, pressing your foot on that pedal just wouldn’t get it to go.

    So you eventually decided that maybe the damage was more than you were capable of fixing, so you decided to go out looking for a mechanic, especially since all your friends and family kept telling you how great they are. The mechanic looks at the symptoms and quite quickly lets you know that with some work, it can be back to what it was, and with your consent, he set about fixing and upgrading the brakes to perform even better than before. Then he looked at the accelerator and found the cable to be loose. So he tightened the nut, and adjusted the cable and once again, the car was able to accelerate without any problems. He also tuned the car with some new equipment that wasn’t previously available, which made the car lighter on fuel, and faster than before.

    However, having had too many close shaves with the brakes and accelerator being faulty, and still remembering the impact of the accident, you keep holding back, wanting to reduce the risk of getting into another accident. The memory of the dents and scratches hidden by the new coat of paint still fresh in your mind, you start driving more cautiously than you ever did before. You slow down for no reason other than just in case, and you don’t even drive at the speed limit any longer, even though the car is perfectly capable of handling it. In fact, the car is now capable of performing better than it did when it was brand new because of the new technology they put in, yet you still drive it slower than ever.

    The crash caused by the other driver is what happens in life. They’re the people around us that we trust, but they end up being mindless in their actions that results in damage in our lives that they’re most often oblivious to. They move on and focus on their own lives, while we wait for someone to come along an fix us. The mechanic is modern medicine. A necessary intervention strategy, but nothing more. Able to recover most physical aspects of our health, but failing to remedy the emotional ravages of what took place.

    The wrinkles and scratches beneath the bright shiny paint work is the memories that haunt us, while the paint work is the face we show to the world when we pretend that everything is perfect. The new technologies are the life lessons learnt, that allows us to deal with future encounters more effectively and maturely, but we refuse to use it because of the fear of getting hit by another reckless driver. So instead, we plod along at a fraction of our capability from before the traumatic incident so that we can reduce as much as possible any potential for another impact that could send us spiralling out of control.

    The psychiatrist that so many believe in blindly have tools to re-establish mental pathways, but they don’t have the tools to make you use it. Again, at times, a necessary intervention strategy, but not a long term solution.

    Then there is you, the driver. Focused on the impact that hit you from nowhere, and too afraid to even consider having to deal with such an impact again. All the while, the distraction of that memory causes you not to notice that with the lessons learnt, your ability to avoid such impacts in future was significantly improved (upgrade of brakes and accelerator, knowledge of how situations like that occur, and what choices could have been taken differently, or could have been more informed), but instead of leveraging that knowledge that you have acquired through the experience for improving the way you navigate your way through life in future, you choose to avoid it instead. Your avoidance of those life experiences, of people, of interactions, is what causes you to slip into a depression where you refuse to acknowledge the tools and abilities you have at your disposal because you suddenly don’t trust yourself due to you blaming yourself for the reckless behaviour of that others.

    The thought almost always comes before the chemical reaction. And in cases where the chemical reaction may have been preventing the thought patterns to occur, the intervention strategies that are available provides us with the ability to kick start that process. Once that process is kick started, we have to apply our minds actively rather than rely on the intervention strategy to sustain us. The problem that many face these days is that they’re being told that the intervention strategy is in fact a long term dependency that they have no choice in. When we give up the choice to take control, only then does the intervention become the mechanism for survival, or even just to cope.

    Our inability to believe in ourselves is the most profitable outcome for the pharmaceutical companies quite possibly in the history of modern medicine. But we have drugs to distract us from that sad reality, that’s why we don’t even have the presence of mind to realise what it is that we’re capable of.

    I once heard someone say that the only way to cheat old age is to continue learning. The more we learn, the greater our ability to acquire new knowledge. Therefore, it is easier for someone with more knowledge to appreciate and intelligently apply new concepts, than it is for someone that hasn’t applied their minds much towards the acquisition of knowledge. When we discard our life experiences as bad memories that we’d rather forget, we effectively throw away priceless knowledge that could never be acquired through any other means. Books and doctors can only give you facts and assumptions, but only you will ever know the truth about you. Don’t suppress that truth, embrace it, and use it to build yourself up from strength to strength, realising that you decide what your limits are, not society.

  • Rose Coloured Delusions

    There is a rot that starts with our assumptions of being so unique that no one else knows our fears or our insecurities. It’s a rot that suggests that if we trust openly, we’ll be mortally wounded and humiliated to the point of self-loathing. This rot is reflected in the headlines that spew forth the accomplishment of some woman in South Africa that has apparently been voted the sexiest woman on the planet. This rot is further expressed in our willingness to indulge in useless fads and trends that make us seem more hip and happening (archaic term used deliberately to demonstrate how ridiculous it is to have ‘cool’ terms to use) so that everyone around us can admire us and aspire to want to be like the image they’ve conjured up in their heads about us.

    This rot…stinks. This rot is what is responsible for groups like FEMEN having a platform, for people like the ANC government of South Africa being revered while raping this country of it’s intellectual, material, economical, and moral wealth, to name only a few domains of corruption. The common denominator in all this is simply the allure of an image driven by unashamed vanity that is cloaked in a pretense of success. When some resist the temptation to be drawn into this downward spiral that leads to a cesspool of base desires, they’re seen as backward, out of touch, or old fashioned.

    The truth is, those that chase that perfect body, that perfect outfit, that perfect hairdo, or that perfect job, they’re the ones that are out of touch. My blog dashboard recently reflected the tragedies of life by someone who witnessed the murder of her own mother followed by the ‘suicide by cop’ of her father juxtaposed against someone who was pursuing a marriage interest. Between these two poles of life, there were others lamenting their weight, their job, their social standing, their image, and a number of other complaints, with very few showing any sincere passion to celebrate life, or at least their life.

    The fickleness of this pervasive ‘modern’ (read secular) culture carries nothing but destruction with it. Its romanticised notions of freedom and liberation are almost always distilled down to the reality of it being an extended experience of a fleeting emotion that was sustained by the imagination of one that is hopeful about reality. However the reality is, much of what the west has given us has slowly but surely resulted in the decay of society, the erosion of wholesome moral values, the ravaging of the environment due to its excessively indulgent consumerist approach to individuality, and its complete abandonment of community to the point where we seek communities online because we don’t recognise our neighbours any longer, and we dump our parents in homes because it’s ‘our time’.

    A casual glimpse of the images of life portrayed in so many online collections of western photographers (oh, the irony) reflecting their experiences and observations of communities and families in non-western settings reveals the almost profound sense of sincerity and joy in a way of life that is rich in culture and social cohesion, while getting by on a fraction of what is needed just to be deemed civil in the west. Those societies that show signs of aspiring to adopt the luxuries or privileges of a so-called first world lifestyle are already reflecting the fatigue and loneliness that accompanies such a choice. The only communities in the west that do not show the ravages of this modern lifestyle are those that still hold on to their traditional values without giving it up to the decay where religion, spirituality, and extended family responsibilities are mocked and ridiculed, to name a few.

    We live in a time of extreme dysfunction to the point where it’s nearly impossible to even recognise it any longer. The retarded way of life has become the norm, so only those that are excessively putrid in how they conduct their lives are actually excluded from main stream society, while the rest keep embellishing their lives with trinkets and distractions that are truly meaningless, but symbolically powerful. No wonder we’re always so tired and the average home cooked meal is no longer sufficient to sustain us without a healthy dose of hamster-like exercise and dietary supplements.

    There is much value and peace of mind in not being obliged to society. It’s easy to achieve as well. Unfortunately in order to do so, we need to know what we stand for and what we desire to achieve independent of those symbolically powerful trinkets and embellishments that have become the frame of our reference of a life well lived.

  • Old School Modesty

    I’ve never been one to mince my words when it comes to sharing my perspectives on morality, respect, and simple values that I believe makes life wholesome and dignified. The amount of pandering to political correctness these days is sickening. Fair enough to say that to each their own, but when that perspective suddenly becomes legislated, then it’s no longer to each their own, but rather to all will be the acceptance of the unacceptable.

    But this post is not about what I find wrong with the moral decline of society across every nation and every religion in general. This is my outburst, or maybe even just my plea for sanity and common sense in a time when dignity is a foreign concept and everything is about acceptable limits only. What is too much or too little is discussed as the focal point of modesty and respect, rather than an holistic approach to what truly maintains the dignity of a human being.

    I often get young girls lamenting the fact that they have really bad or non-existent relationships with their fathers. Many, if not most of them, go as far as stating that they don’t give a damn about whether or not their father is a part of their life, or will be a part of some really significant life events, and more often than not those breakdowns are a result of a lack of self-respect on the part of the daughter. This does not in any way justify or excuse the behaviour of those pathetic fathers that are absent in their daughter’s lives. That can never be excused.

    This is about the father that tried to maintain a healthy relationship with his daughter but was prevented from doing so because she felt inclined to be womanly before being a daughter. I look at young girls with their fathers and I wonder how is it possible for them not to feel shame about the way they dress in front of them let alone in public? A father should never have to lower his gaze when looking at his daughter. If he does, that speaks volumes about the disrespect that his daughter has for him.

    We wonder why incest, family rape, sexual molestation, and similar despicable acts are on the increase, but we don’t question how we conduct ourselves as a society, or even as a family unit? When daughters feel nothing about appearing sexually alluring in front of their fathers, or brothers for that matter, then don’t be surprised when her male family members either disrespect her, want to have nothing to do with her, or treat her in ways that are morally questionable.

    Am I placing the blame only on daughters? Not at all. There is as much that can be said about the parenting skills of many fathers, and mothers. But right now, I’m incensed by the complaints of girls that come from decent homes with fathers that are not absent, that still maintain them, and that are not abusive, on drugs, or alcohol, or even cigarettes, and in fact are even religiously grounded in many cases, yet the girls find it more important to establish their identities as women regardless of the impact it may have on their relationships with significant male role models that they will inevitably regret not having around later in life.

    Modesty is for sale, and dignity is not even in the catalogue anymore. Worse than this, dignity is a concept that seems to have been set aside in favour of freedom of expression and individual rights. It’s always the ones that are screaming for independence in this manner that are mourning the erosion of society and community as recalled by the old folks. Like the beloved prophet (pbuh) once said something to the effect that when modesty is gone, do as you please. If you don’t respect yourself, or even lack the presence of mind to know what that respect should entail, then don’t expect much more than that from the people around you. This juvenile concept of unconditional this and unconditional that is nothing but unconditional rubbish. When we stop expecting acceptance no matter what, maybe then we’ll start establishing wholesome relationships that are grounded on respect and dignity, rather than just common fashion, sexual, or social interests.