19 Oct Khalid’s Corner: The Importance of Listening
Words of wisdom from community leader Khalid Elahi
Life is real, made up of lessons and curve balls. How well you listen determines how long you live. In my case, you can say that I’m lucky that I didn’t lose my life because, in most cases, I learned from being burned, instead of learning from the magic of listening. If you listen, you can prevent that kind of stuff from happening to you. A senseless death and other tragic situations can be avoided, even by something as simple as looking both ways when you cross the street.
Before I fully understood the magic of listening, I was actually doing the things that people told me not do, like having unprotected social relationships. I was fully warned, but I still had to put my hand in the flame to see if was really as bad as they said it was.
It was worse.
What’s truly important to understand is that life is so precious we shouldn’t ever rely on luck to be the common denominator in our equation of life. That is a mighty risk to do. You don’t know if a decision will be life-ending or negatively life-altering. Your life must be protected by the accumulation of wise decisions instead of stunts. Spur of the moment actions, showing off, being someone that you really not, an actor.
So many people have said to me, “I wish my baby was in jail” when reminiscing after someone is gone, and the obituary has collected dust.
You see the street game constantly changes, the worse thing that used to happen is, you did a dumb move you went to jail. Nowadays, you get killed for dumb moves out there, and in a sense, jail is a prize for the lucky.
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