By Shawal Ras
My biggest fear is to lose my parents.
The fact is hard to swallow. I know. But one day, our parents will leave us and it will be, in the spirit of being brutally frank, the biggest and worst lost one will ever experience, and I dread for its coming. It is a scary thought.
I’m deep, tonight.
Deep.
It’s almost 2 am and I can’t sleep. I keep on remembering those days when I was a kid. My mom and dad would play with my sisters and I. We’re running at the beach in front of my grandparents’ house in Terengganu and it’s very vivid but grainy like those effects in old videotapes. Barbra Streisand’s ‘The Way We Were’ is playing in my thought and I can’t help but voice this one out: how dramatic can I be?
Anyway, those were some of my childhood memories. Now, my dad just turned 68, my mom is 62. Despite they’re being fit and happy (trust me, my dad still got his biceps while his son – me – is, uh, pregnant), it’s hard to ignore that their health is deteriorating in front of me, albeit slowly, and again; it’s a scary thought for any kid out there.
I’ve been living in Kuala Lumpur for more than eight years now and once every few months, I’ll travel back to Terengganu to see them. Sometimes, it’s the other way round. Back then, there’s no such thing as smart phone and I’d go home and spend most of my time with them or in my bed. Friends? Trust me, I got none back home. My parents are my friends, to be honest.
But nowadays, whenever I am home, I have to admit that I spend a lot of my time on the Internet. I’d go on Twitter or check on my Facebook, even during family time, in the car, in my aunt’s house, in the porch, on the bed, during lunch, dinner… It’s amazing how much one can do in these silly networking sites, but, it’s also amazingly sad to realise I just spent an entire hour being online while my parents are watching the re-run of The Walking Dead with me being an actual zombie next to them.
This article is an intervention to myself. To you. To us. To the future.
My addiction with the Internet started the moment I bought my first smartphone; a BlackBerry. I was working in the world of media so naturally my life is in this small gadget in my hand. Emails are pouring in endlessly, I got texts in my BBM, WhatsApp, not to mention Tweets and Facebook notifications – and I think my career lifestyle works its way into my life, hence why I am always checking and checking. That gadget died on me one day, then came this heavenly creature descends from above and it’s called iPhone.
iPhone is the epitome of everything that is cool with being in trend. Thanks to the perks of working in the media, I got it for a really cheap price and I can’t help but wonder if the day I bought it was the day I mistakenly signed a contract with the devil.
I got addicted. I’m in all of those silly apps and I can’t help myself but to try and have everything.
It’s bad, right?
Tonight, the thought of what I’ve written above got me feeling blue. I don’t like what I’ve turned into and I’m vowing to change. I want to spend my day not by staring at the screen but to fall back on the green grass in the park and breathe the not-so-fresh-but-real-nonetheless hazy air of Malaysia and I want to have an actual conversation with my family, especially my parents.
They’re getting older by the second and I believe it is not right for us to put them second to whatever life that we have in our phone. It’s not right. They need the love from us and we should give it to them.
There’s this one quote my dad always said whenever me and my sisters are fighting; “family is forever, remember that.”
So, for that, I’m logging out. I’m hoping you’ll reap something from my mistake. I’m lucky to realise this earlier and it’s not too late to change for a better lifestyle.
Sign out. Turn it off. Live.***
Photo taken from Viral Novelty