How Was Your Day?

At the end of a hard day’s work, when we reach home, we tend to expect undivided attention from our family. It is quite natural too. We expect them to welcome us with a smile and “How was your day?” on their lips, to turn off the television or render it to our services, supply hot coffee and snacks to our mouths and await our next orders. I know none of us want to be the ones doing these things but more often than not end up doing it anyways. It is basic human tendency to first think of ourselves and only then turn our attention to others but, some of these small, supposedly inconsequential behaviors of ours lead to substantially big problems. So, a small amount of conscious effort must be put into suppressing these basic instincts.

For a starter, we must try giving to people what we expect from them. At the end of a hard day’s work, let us smile and ask our family at home “How was your day?” Let us not be deceived that staying at home all day would hardly warrant such a question. They might not have faced pressure in terms of meeting deadlines, interacting with irrational colleagues or arranging funds for that housing loan but something much more subtle and hard to pin-point. For e.g., a non-working mother who had given up her career to bring up her children and now feels wasted, a retired father who feels lost without his job or a teenage sibling going through his/her first heart-break. It might be easy for us to say these are just passing phases, but let’s stand back and think for a while – would we not have expected support if we were going through these phases? We definitely would have expected someone to come and sit by us and ask us how we are feeling. These kinds of problems are often not expressed by anyone voluntarily, for fear of being called a looser and suppressed even more fiercely when faced with a seemingly unconcerned person. This obviously does more harm than help because these feelings are then vented out as anger on anyone and everyone for no apparent reason and anger has never been known to result in anything pleasant.

So, let us keep a watch on our loved ones and show them we care. Let us put ourselves aside for a while and ask them “How Was Your Day?”