Fruitful plate (Part 2)...

Do you know why we have to wash and rinse rice before cooking it? When I was a kid, I thought the reason was because the rice is dirty. When I started learning to cook rice, I wash it thoroughly, until the water is crystal clear; just imagine how much water I wasted on my first rice wash. When my mother saw the result, she knew right away what I did. She asked me why and I told her that I wanted the rice to be completely clean. Then, she give me the do's and the don'ts. Do: Wash the rice just to make sure that it is clean from the insects/weevils. Don't: Wash too thoroughly because we might miss the nutrition.

No matter how careful we are, we might miss a few insects. Every so often, we found small stones or insects in our food. These food are not safe for us to eat. Same thing if we are served with the food that we are allergic to. If you know there are stones in it or you know that you are allergic to it before you eat it, stay far away from it. It could be tempting, like serving an ice-cream for a diabetic. But it is dangerous. However, if you have accidentally eat it, get a cure. Let the experts handle it. Fetch a doctor, get medicine. Do whatever you have to do except eating it.

Same thing in life. We play fair. We stay clean, or at least we try our best to live safely. However, life is full of surprises and sometimes it surprises us with these dangerous challenges. It could be anything, from the smallest of things to the highest of things. It could come from your neighborhood; a neighbor could be asking you to lie for them, it could come from a workplace; a client giving you a hamper just before you approve their loan. These people could be your dearest friend or a family member. As a human, no doubt that we will feel incline to abide to their request, but DON'T.

This is the poison of your life. You are not helping anyone by doing that. You have to learn to say NO. If it has to do with legal procedures, let the other responsible party deal with it. And, if you are involved in it unknowingly, get out right away. Then, ask for an expert's advice. If a damage control needs to be done, do it. You are after all responsible for your own action.

My mother put dried chillies in the place where we store the rice. Her reason is that it will keep the insects away. I'm not sure if it really works. But at least she tried, to keep us healthy. Same thing in life, prevention is always better than cure. But like the rice, don't wash it too thoroughly, you might take away the life's many nutritions.

Fruitful plate (part one)..







Often, we heard people say "I cannot deal with this right now, I already have too many things on my plate". Well, that is actually quite a good analogy, things on the plate represent the challenges in life. What people often omit to do is to use the same analogy to deal with it.







Let's take a a typical Malay/Asian meal for an example. What we normally see on their plate are rice, vegetables and meat. Each of these food contributes in making us stronger and healthier. Rice gives us carbohydrate, vegetables is of course rich with nutrition and meat provide us with protein. In life, these foods are the challenges that we deal with everyday. Each and every challenges contributes in helping us to be a physically strong and emotionally healthy person (if we deal with it correctly). Just as a food is a need, challenges are also the same.





Most of the times, we enjoy eating because the food taste good. However, sometimes, without us wanting, we are given the food that we don't like. Some people choose to walk away from the plate, take a nap and hope that somebody else will pick up the food while they are sleeping. Sometimes, we are lucky enough, when we wake up, the food is gone. But most of the times, when we wake up, the food is already so rotten and smelly. To avoid our neighbor's complaints, we are now forced to shove the food down our throat. The result? food poisoning if not death.







Same things in life, everyday we are dealing with positive and negative challenges. Marriage and a newborn would be the positive challenges because we love it even though it is a hassle. However, sometimes we are forced to deal with negative challenges, like a divorced or a death of the loved ones. When it happens, we cannot leave and expect people to solve it for us or hoping that the problems will solve by itself. Every once in a while, it can happen, but most of the times, it DIDN'T!







Walking away is definitely not the answer and time will only make it worse. Some personal problems can be a talk of a neighborhood just because it was left long enough for people to pick up on the stories. At this time, there's nothing that you can do other than solving it or suffer a chronic depression which eventually will put you in an asylum or early grave. It's harsh, but then again, so is life.







*iklan* Just downloaded the new mozilla firefox (version 2.0). Excellent web browser, with cool add-ons: fireFTP acts as a web FTP-fast, sturdy and user friendly; Greasemonkey allows you to change the scripts of the websites you are viewing;Cooliris previews let you preview the page when you hover your cursor over a link;Firebug (gotta be the coolest!!) lets u explore all (n i mean ALL) the inner workings of a webpage-css,javascript,images,etc-a web-developers playground!!! I could go on for pages but why don't you go check it out.. and for goodness sake, download it!







Download Mozilla Firefox 2.0: http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/







Download Add-Ons: https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/recommended/