This afternoon while sitting in Labrador park reading for the 4th time Robert Kiyosaki’s book “Rich Dad, Poor Dad”, a signification truth suddenly dawned upon me. This flash of insight happened when I was staring at the waves in front of me thinking about happened the night before.
I spent most of the afternoon before with Embre, helping her sort out her company’s computer needs. We had dinner after that and parted our ways. I was reading the same book in the train on the way home when Ada stepped out from my past memories into the present and sat right beside me.
To the Ada now, I was no more than a mere stranger, she had no recollections of me as a person. I choose to remained in this shroud of anonymity and studied her as I did so many years age when she buried her tear strewn face in my lap lamenting how cruel life was to her with her first losing her beloved brother to a traffic accident and then losing her extremely wealthy boy friend due to her own stubbornness. In the midst of her crying back then she would occasionally lash out at the person beside as an injured wild animal would. I did what I could to console her. It was emotionally draining for me sitting beside her those late nights. After her bouts of tears, I would return her to her door steps, while I, being the broke student that I was, would spend the next 3 hours walking home to Clementi from Boon Lay.
I had this inkling since our start that we will never make it together, however for some unknown reasons I stayed put. Till this day, I do not know if such an act of mine was out of sympathy, affection, loyalty, obligation or pride? My release from this chain came the night she went to bed with another man. Ironically he was gay. Thank the lord and amen to that, I excused myself from her presence and moved along in my path. I felt much pain initially but over time, the usual sense of lightness and relief returned.
It was strange now sitting beside her in the train. I felt like a ghost. Or maybe she was the ghost. Some of her nails were chipped, her hair now showed a few more strands of white. Nothing much about her has changed since the day we parted.
Staring at the waves thoughts of Ada soon left my mind, followed by thoughts of a few others whom I had very similar encounters with, quite a few of them pretty recent…
Finally, the voice of Robert himself spoke to me. What he said could be found in a paragraph from page 42 of this book I was holding in front of me.
Paraphrased “Life is the best teacher of all. But unlike lecturers in school, most of the time, life does not talk to you. It just sort of pushes you around. Each push is life saying ‘wake up, there is something I want you to learn.’ ”
I finally realized there was a lesson to be learned here. This time I knew what it was I needed to learn.
Everyone has their own path and I should restrict my aid to any person to just words of advice as Robert’s rich dad did on Robert during his time of trial. Committing money, resource, time and effort towards bringing them to a path I wish for them is futile. Such will only delay me in the pursuit of my own path and serve them no purpose in their pursuit of their own, if not detract them from their own.
Let Life be their teacher and they make their own decisions for better or for worst. Henceforth situations which require my commitment of money, resource, time or effort will be tightly coupled with a strong profit motif and stay strictly business. So it is, I have finally understood and accepted the principal past down from dad to son and I finally free of the chains of this false sense of obligation.