I stay in a guarded and gated community that has many outdoor facilities built for the comfort of residents.
It also has quite a large team of workers deployed to maintain the beautiful landscape spread over 300 acres of lush greenery.
One of the many facilities is a beautifully constructed pavilion where residents can seek refuge from the sun or rain. On normal days, it serves as a great place to spend time with family members, visiting friends or neighbours.
My usual cycling routine would entail a rest stop at this pavilion to do my stretching before finishing my final lap home.
A few years ago, as I was taking a break at the pavilion from my cycling, I noticed two workers resting there.
Initially I thought nothing of it. After all, it was their break time and they needed a place to rest.
A few days later, the number of workers resting in the same pavilion grew to four. The numbers kept increasing every time I stopped by. The last count was nine and they occupied almost every part of the pavilion in various positions. Some were sitting and many were lying on their backs, fiddling with their hand phones.
It suddenly dawned on me that their presence had intruded into the quiet moments in a facility that was purposely built for the comfort of the residents.
It took me three years and writing to three different presidents of the residents association before this issue was resolved.
Like my initial decision to turn a blind eye over two workers using this resident’s facility as their rest area, the two past presidents who ignored my feedback must have had their good judgments overwhelmed by compassion.
On the same premise, a recent political leader’s decision to fly some war victims and their family members into Malaysia on compassionate grounds is a reflection of his poor wisdom on charity.
His response of disappointment over the backlash he received from many quarters reinforced his misconception of the situation.
Apparently, he didn’t realise that those who criticised his action was not against his compassion but rather against his poor judgement of who and when to help.
His action bore a close resemblance of Uncle Tan, a founding member of an orphanage who went to the extreme of sacrificing his own family’s needs to finance his orphanage.
He was so engrossed with his charitable cause that he allowed his compassion to overrule the logic that charity must begin at home.
In spite of pleas from his family members to exercise constraint, Uncle Tan sold all his properties to serve the needy orphans whom he had grown very attached to.
Granted, Uncle Tan’s action was highly honourable in the face of many and he deserved every ounce of commendation.
But to deprive his own family members of a more caring and comfortable environment seems to defy logic. Perhaps, he came to a conclusion that he had provided enough for his family members and that his orphans needed more help.
Whatever the reasons, rightly or wrongly, today he found himself estranged from his biological children. He had since run out of finances. Swallowing his self pride, he is now resorting to raise funds for his charity home, something which he thought he never had to.
Was it a poor judgement or was he overwhelmed by compassion ?
With this in mind, we must remember that we should not allow compassion to overrule a sound judgement - one that we must make with wisdom and taking into consideration, among many others , our personal needs.
It is important that we set our priorities right.
Vincent Lim is a content creator under the Newswav Creator programme, where you get to express yourself, be a citizen journalist, and at the same time monetize your content & reach millions of users on Newswav. Log in to creator.newswav.com and become a Newswav Creator now!
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