Yours are mine

I learned a very important thing I need to remember for the rest of my life today. This is gonna be what I hold for, in building my self-discipline, my own principle, and my well-being. So we had like this one kenduri in conjunction with Hari Raya AidilAdha. All my family members gathered and there’s no way for any of us to  be excluded from doing works. The surrounding was extremely hectic. I was just unfortunate for not having the chance to picture the condition.

My mother’s family is a big family. There were like 3-4 generations exist. I have 3 cousins who are of the same age as I am in the family. So when we meet, we converse like nobody cares. It comes down to when we’re now 21 and we all have an ongoing journey. One of us has finished Diploma in nursing, one is working, another one including me have just finished our part time job while waiting for the upcoming new semester.

We talked about basic things other people would probably talked about, the amount of salary, what are we gonna do with the money, gossips about what’s going on in our previous workplace, all those things. So I’m the one who started it all. I’ve a thought that I think I should give some portion of the money to my parents. This is not my first part time job by the way. But all this while I’m working, a lot of my salary was used to buy my own necessities. Nahh not necessities sangat lah. So far, I was using the money to upgrade my camera equipment.

One information I would like to tell you guys is that, photographers will start small. But when they start to develop big, especially in term of skill, some of them (I would say most of them) might also develop their equipment. It’s like how people used to drive Proton Iswara once but now they’ve upgrade to MPV because their family is developing. There was this one day where I talked to my sister-in-law. “Selama ni buat job job wedding tu, rasa macam duit tu habis je. Dapat duit lepas job pun, habis macam tu juga upgrade equipment”. My sister-in-law said, “selama ni awak kerja, pernah tak awak bagi sikit kat mama atau abah”. I sighed. I mean, should I? I found no relation between duit habis, and bagi duit sikit kat parents. I know right, we think we work for it, so the money is all on us, even we’re still under their tanggungan kot. Days after that conversation, I think a lot. That might be true. You know when they say about ‘keberkatan’ right? I don’t want to talk long about that because I think you get the idea.

People keep saying to me, “masyuk la tiap tiap bulan buat job”, “untunglah ada job”, all those words. But they never thought of how much times we put to settle the job when they have their leisure time to waste, and we’re still facing our laptop and get everything done on time. Also, do you know that not all of us photographers (this includes videographer, graphic designer etc), got paid according to how much effort we put on? In another understandable word, ‘setimpal’. Sometimes we can compromise because we understand. To let you know, sometimes people take us for granted, they ask us to ‘help’ them taking photos for free, designing posters for free without knowing how many time we’ve sacrificed from doing our own assignments, how much money we’ve invested on our equipment, how many times our parents were barking for being home late, for not getting good results, they can simply say we’re ‘kedekut’, ‘taknak tolong kawan’, and whatnot.

For me, every works has its own exhausting part. There’s no easy work in this world. Everyone is struggling. What differ us all, is whether we put passion in the work we do. I started to realize this and found that is why I always rant on my exhaustment each and every day I work. It’s very simple, if we want something, we gotta work for it.

Back to the story, so I asked my cousin. She had quite the same amount of salary for that month so she told me she gives ¼ of the salary to her mom. I’m awed. That’s quite a lot my prediction does not even reach that amount. That makes me ask for reasons. She’s very simple. She said “Aku rasa macam nak bagi jumlah tu, so aku bagi je. Lagipun aku fikir, mak aku tak pernah berkira dengan aku, kenapa aku kena berkira dengan mak aku”. She makes me smile bitterly. Damn, it’s true. She also shared this one word his brother who worked in Dubai currently has been reminding her.”Dalam rezeki kita, ada rezeki orang lain jugak”. My brother said, , “jangan kedekut, nanti rezeki akan jadi sempit. Antara tanda rezeki kita akan ditarik, ialah kita tak bersyukur”. When they say, put the world in your hands, not your heart, it’s always easy to hear, but not remember. Everything in this world is not ours permanently. Put trust in Him. Spend your money wisely. Always concern on ‘keberkatan’ in everything we do J