So, I have my own business, and my workshop is situated among many other shops. About 98% of the shop owners are family people, and up till today, I still find it hard to comprehend how they balance their family life with their work life. Most of them spend the whole day at their shops and don't return home until around 9 p.m. to 11 p.m.
Most times, whenever they give me clothes to wash, they expect me to stay until they close so they can come and collect them. Oh yeah, I do laundry for people. On many occasions, they've come to collect their clothes around 8 p.m. or 9 p.m. after I've already closed for the day. Then, the next day, they would query me for closing "too early," and I always find that complaint very funny.
Just because they close late, because they don't seem to like the comfort of their beds at home, and because their whole lives revolve around their shops, they expect everyone else to live the same way. That's usually how I respond to their complaints.
There's one particular family, a mother, father, and two children, who run a building materials store. They arrive very early every day, leave very late at night, and even open on Sundays. I keep asking myself, how are they coping with their personal and family life? Hold on, it's not even as though what they sell is in demand 24/7. It's cement and other building materials, for goodness' sake!
I may not be perfect at balancing my personal life with my work life, but I have made it a habit to leave my workplace as soon as it's 7 p.m., except on Saturdays when the workload is usually much heavier.
Normally, once it's 7 p.m., my personal life comes knocking, and I must give myself that time and space to cater to it.
Back in the day when I was living in the village with my family, farming was, and still is, our means of survival. Once it got to the evening, we would dust ourselves off and call it a day, no matter how heavy the workload was. My dad would usually say that the grass in the farm and is not growing under his bed. What he meant was that the farm work remains in the farm, and as soon as we close for the day, we should put it out of our minds until the next morning.
Thanks for reading.
Photo: Own photo
