life and death

5 days ago, my world got turned upside down when my boss and partner died suddenly without a hint of warning to us all. One day he was in office and making phone calls as usual to lunch with his business associates and the next he was gone. Now we as his partners have to take care of his estate and the continuity of the partnership and firm. We have had to set aside personal sentiments and notions of loyalty and seek legal advice ourselves as to the legal implications of his untimely death, especially what now we, as his surviving partners, are to do. The problem is that my late partner's son is not a lawyer which rather complicates things. We cannot let him assume the reins of the practice and step into his father's shoes because of this, as much as we may personally feel obliged to do so. The assets capital and Good Will of the firm belongs to the estate of my late partner and it is up to us now as the surviving partners whether to buy over the Good Will of the firm to continue the practice in the same name and style as before or to dissolve the partnership and call it a day. Me and my 2 other partners have come up with an initial sum of RM20,000 each to keep things running but we cannot personally pick up the daily expenses of the firm indefinitely. As such, a meeting with the family of my deceased partner and the representatives of the state bar has been arranged over the next few days so that we could iron out the various issues we have to deal with on an urgent basis. 

I pray that God grants my late partner rest in heaven and mercy for his soul and divine guidance for us in managing his affairs and our partnership.

learning to fly

Work-related stress is probably the Number One cause of much unhappiness in many households today. Learning how to cope with stress, stress management is a skill i would like to learn. Just today i was feeling quite irritable and tired after work. My wife was having diarrhea after holidaying abroad last weekend and she hadn't recovered even 4 days after coming home. We went to see a doctor and i gave her token words of comfort but inside i was really hoping that she would get well again quickly, immediately, and not get us bogged down in sickness. i wanted her to be well again for my own selfish reasons. i should have been more sympathetic to her just as she would surely have shown great sympathy for me had i been the sick one. But it really wasn't about her or her being sick. It was rooted in my having had a long day at the office, things not working out as i'd like them to be, mistakes at work which, had i been more meticulous and careful, could have been avoided. All of which rolled together into a tangled ball of stress that i couldn't untangle out of on my own. And so i took it out on my wife who was feeling poorly. i blamed her for being weak and for falling sick so often eventhough this was something that one couldn't assign blame for. It's funny how easily we look for a convenient scapegoat whenever things don't run smoothly for us. it's always somebody else's fault, not ours. So this general moodiness and irritability carried on even after dinner, but thanks to recently having prayed more often than before, i maintained a slender but tenacious grasp on hope and inner peace. While visiting our daughter at the baby sitter's i played with our daughter and made her laugh out loud in delight. That took away the tightly-wound up ball of stress immediately. Hearing her little shrieks of joy had a deeply therapeutic effect on myself that i simply cannot describe sufficiently in words. You have to experience it personally to understand how that felt. And it felt good. Other self-help measures such as prayer helped too. The root of one's unhappiness can often be traced back to events that happened at the office/outside and work-related stress. All sorts of hardships and challenges do and they will come. It's important not to be too sucked in by the nitty-gritty details and to be able to take a calm and peaceful step back and put matters into perspective. It's work it isn't anything else really. And work will never finish. But one keeps at it all the same and commit to even more effort and sustained effort at that, come what may. Work-related stress shouldn't be brought home to spoil your day and your relationship with your loved ones. It should be left at the office. It's difficult to untangle oneself from the ball of stress, sometimes almost impossible to get out of the trap. I am rather thankful that the laughter of a baby could help me achieve that. And so effortlessly too, at that. :)