The Choice
EVERY moment in life, we are faced with a choice.
Which should command our preference--the demands of our job or
the duties to our family?
If there is a board meeting today at the same hours that our son
graduates from school, where should we go -- to the boardroom or
to the graduation ceremony?
If we have to make a very important presentation tomorrow, so as
to advance our career, but our wife says she has to see the
doctor on a suspicion of cancer, which appointment should we keep?
These are the daily battles of conscience we have to wage,
trying to keep a balance between our responsibility to earn a
living and our opportunity to live a life.
And our choices invariably reveal who we really are.
Our preferences indicate our true character.
Our priorities are the best indicators of our real identity.
What profits success?
I know that many of you out there would go for career on the
pretension that after all, you are doing all these for the family.
Many of you, dear readers, would rather become outstanding
employees, model personnel instead of being doting fathers or
loving husbands.
Many of you would opt to perform exceedingly well in the office
even if you work 12 to 16 hours a day, going home only to change
clothes or catch a few hours of sleep.
But what for? At the end of the day, what have you accomplished?
What profits a highly successful professional or wealthy
businessman if ultimately, he loses his family, wrecks his
marriage or dishonors the name he will leave to his children?
What has a rich man accomplished if he has built a fortune and
founded conglomerates of highly profitable companies and yet
drives his own wife to vices or infidelity, his children to drugs
and delinquency and himself to spiritual decay and total burnout?
What matters most?
Look around you. The evidence is overwhelming and irreversible.
Families are shattered.
Marriages are broken.
Lives are reduced to utter emptiness.
Even as man advances in wealth and success, he deteriorates on
the basic standards of joy, peace and serenity. As we all compete
and struggle for power and possessions, we often neglect what
really matters most. In our insatiable mania for supremacy over
the rest, we often forget the most important things in life.
I will respect your choice. But as for me, my priorities are
clear. Between career and family, I will always go for family.
I can forego that board meeting and earn the ire of my boss or
make a bad impression on my peers. But I shall not inflict a
lifetime trauma on my son by sending him alone to graduate
without his dad. I can forget that business presentation and
lose a valued client or waste a career promotion, but I cannot
leave my wife alone in her moments of anxiety.
Meaningless?
Why should a well-known public figure commit suicide given all
his fame and fortune? Can his wealth and wisdom compensate for
ruptures in his relationships?
Why should a wife of a famous politician commit adultery with
the family driver? Is it lust or vain fixation for the
pleasures of the flesh? Or is it the pain of being neglected
and ignored by the husband she used to adore?
Why should a son cut his wrist or a daughter drink poison
despite all the luxuries and pleasures they are showered with?
Can money replace love?
Can pleasure take the place of affections?
In this age of top line technology and convenience gadgets, why
are humans talking to computers rather than with each other?
Why are we retrenching people and replacing them with robots and
machines?
Why have we lost the simple joys of nurturing relationships with
bank tellers because we have replaced them with ATMs?
Why, with all our cells, e-mails, Internets, websites or the
endemic texting, are we no longer communicating?
Why are family members no longer talking to each other?
The ultimate hell?
To succeed in career and fail in the family is, to me, the
ultimate hell.
John Grisham, that famous author of legal fictions wrote
"The Testament," which tells of a highly successful
industrialist who made billions of dollars but lost his family.
In the first 10 pages of the novel, he jumped to his death from
his multi-story building in front of his self-centered children.
By his will, he disinherited all of them and bequeathed his entire
estate to an illegitimate daughter who refused to accept it.
That is the ultimate irony; those who lusted for money lost it.
Those who were given all the money refused it.
In all his dozen masterpieces, Grisham tells us about the
importance of family. "A Time to Kill" tells of a father who
went to jail for killing his daughter's rapists.
Indeed, we who are simple folks should learn from the mistakes
of others. We should straighten our lives and put our
priorities in order.
I don't know about you.
But as for me and my house, our credo is: There is no success in
a career that can make up for a failure in the family.
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