15 minutes Talks with Middle Aged Woman; a Lesson about Self-awareness and Gratitude
I met her on January, last year.
This middle aged woman is neither someone who writes on a cool-readings-portal in internet, nor a person who holds high education degree, nor an internet “influencer”.
She is a humble person, a house wife, a mother, living in a village, she did not have chance to get formal education, and she managed to influence me so much during our 15 minutes talks.
As I asked her where the other family members are, she started telling me that at the moment she lives with her husband only. They have seven children and thirteen grand-children. Despite coming from formally uneducated background, this cool spouse managed to raise and educate their children well. Among seven children, three of them are teachers, the other three of them work for government in military area, and the last one is still studying as a final year student in uni. Even one of their grandchildren got scholarship to STAN (Indonesian State College of Accountancy).
Plus, please note that among the entire village only this spouse who managed to bring their children get higher education and stable job. I was super astonished by those facts and extremely curious on how this spouse managed to achieve them.
Until this middle aged woman told me, “When we married, we had dream that we do not want to see our children to be farmers just like us, in the future.”
Lesson learned 1: always set goals
She continued, “Even when other people are buying new stuffs or renovating their houses. We are always calm and happy about it. We are never jealous about it. Since our focus is to get our children properly educated. We always save our money for it and seek Allah’s help.”
Lesson learned 2: Always cultivate self-awareness. This spouse do aware of what they actually need and throw their wants away. They are able to focus on their internal callings and goals, plus throw the external distractions away. Even when their focus is totally different compared to the rest of entire villagers’. They strive for what they believe and they never compare between themselves and others. Just focus on theirs.
Author Jan Frazier states in The Freedom of Being: At Ease with What Is that we must redirect our attention away from external events to within: “If you want to lead a more peaceful life, the primary focus should shift from external events to the inner, as a general practice.”
She added, “Even we could only eat rice with sambal kosek. It is okay. We believe in Allah’s promises.”
Lesson learned 3: Always cultivate gratitude and deploy patience. For years this spouse have to always be grateful for all the bitter process and patient about it. Since they believe in Allah’s promises that their gratitude and patience will be fruitful harvest in the future.
“And seek help through patience and prayer, and indeed, it is difficult except for the humbly submissive [to Allah ]” Al Quran, Al Baqarah verse 45.
And Ma Shaa Allah, they made it.
On September last year, I met this amazing woman again. She gave me a hug, yet we didn’t have much convo. I was still happy to see her.
May Allah SWT always gives ease for her family.
