Looking for a sign...

It has been a tearful and agonizing week for me. I am still trying to find some sense in the decision that I am about to make.

Bak kata orang melayu, ditelan mati bapak, diluah mati mak.

Although I am fortunate to have people around me who are supportive of the decision, I still have doubts of the challenges ahead. A last my beloved mother has made some sense into all this. Nothing is successful without sacrifices and nobody said the road ahead will be easy. "It is a challenge for all the right reasons...do you think Allah swt will shun you for something that is written in the Holy Scriptures?"

So I prayed longer as she suggested...sitting for more than an hour after solah on my prayer mat.

And who said isthikarah had to come in dreams...the first glance was a book sitting by my bedside gathering dust. I've been so hype in reading baby books that I have left this literature aside...little did I know I found the sign I was looking for.

4. Stop Trying to Be So "Successful"

In remarks delivered at the University of Toronto's Women's Centenary, Claudette Mackey-Lassonde, chairman and CEO of Enghouse Systems, Ltd., observed that "somehow we have forgotten to explain to young men and women that making a choice means forgoing something else. We seem to have overlooked this simple truth. Choosing to travel down one path closes off another. Some may appear to have it all-the glamorous job, the power, the status. But what they do not have is happiness, satisfaction, or purpose in what they are doing". Her message was that women pay a price for certain choices. She cited studies which show that the overwhelming majority of Canadian male executives are married, as opposed to slightly more than fifty percent of their female co-workers. She pointed out that while most Canadian male executives have children, barely half of their female counterparts do. And in sharp contrast to the low divorce rate for men, more than half the women executives' marriages had ended. "I know some of the women behind these statistics," she said. "They are the loneliest people I have ever met. I know women who didn't have children because of their careers. I know some, with children, who don't even acknowledge that they are parents. The irony is that the price of success often includes giving up family life when often the family is the reason why people work so hard in the first place." - When Work Doesn’t Work Anymore: Women, Work & Identity – Elizabeth Perle McKenna


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