When I attended a talk by Mufti Menk last 3 weeks on parenting, he pointed out something very true in our modern era of hi-tech.

With the smartphones, we spend so much time on these social medias (Facebook and Instagram and Twitter), just to keep ourselves occupied that it has become a habit.

Image from Google

Whether its 'going into the lift' or 'waiting for food to arrive at the restaurant' or even 'in the toilet'! It has become a habit to just click on the instagram logo and click refresh even if we just did that 5 minutes ago.

Menk puts our brain just like a computer - that it can only do so much in a day. He said that we've been spending too many space in the brain for unimportant things that we don't seem to have time for the important things like memorizing a surah from the Quran or to gain more knowledge to enable us to be better people - better Muslims. At the end of each day, we're just too tired to even reflect on our day. The excuse seem to be the same all the time  - I don't have enough time.

I was ashamed because I was one of those. It was time to set on some rules. He also reminded that if we want to see results in our child, we need to start with ourselves first. Since Aisya is still small, its best to just start right away. So we've decided that our new rule now is to not have phones on the table during meals. And not to play with our phones at traffic lights in the car. Me and and Mr can just go on and on talking and sharing ideas and perspective on things - on how to raise our child and our family - on Joe Flizzow and Vivy Yusof. Quality conversations.

However, that only lasted for 2 weeks and we're somehow back to our old habits back. Old habits do die hard! I'm not sure what's the power of these smartphones that just attracts you to just hold onto it and feel restless without it. I know for sure on of the reasons is because we're running an online store, so orders and enquiries come in various ways; facebook, instagram, whatsapp, emails. But we can limit a time to when we should check on them right? We should set a time!

I'm a little bit disappointed but I'm gonna take this as a reminder and a challenge that I can do this.

Lets.