Self-respect

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In the early mornings of today, I had wandered deep into my street, hopelessly searching for anything I could buy for breakfast. I had gone to bed the previous night without having dinner, so my growling stomach decided it had had enough and woke me up earlier than usual.

Unfortunately, I happen to be the worse person when it comes to thinking of something to eat, hence my wandering. Anyways, I remember getting to this shop and I saw a couple of elderly men, sitting and happily drinking dry gin.

I'm sure it wasn't even 9am yet and some of them were already drunk. Looking at them, I suddenly remembered many years ago when my dad had taught me a valuable lesson about self-respect. My dad and I had walked past a group of men playing checkers early in the morning under a big tree. Most of them had their shirts hung on their necks, exposing their huge stomach. Suddenly an argument ensued between the men and it almost broke into a fight. Apparently, one of them was caught cheating.

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Photo by Tai's Captures

As we walked home, my dad began one of his wisdom talks. He doesn't do it every time but whenever he does, we always made sure to listen because aside from the lesson he was trying to teach us, he always does this thing where he usually accompanies all of his lessons with some very juicy stories, so I paid attention.

He began to talk about how a man should always give himself some self-respect and avoid having to come out early in the morning only to go play checkers and fight when other men are out there working. He also said that even if that person had nothing to do, staying at home with your family was far more better than coming outside to fight and disgrace yourself in public.

Then he proceeded to tell me a story.

He told me a story about one of our neighbours who once had issues with us. We honestly had no idea what we did wrong or what made him hate us all of a sudden, but he did and began to do all sorts of things just to get to us.

I didn't know about this but according to my dad, there was a time when the man began to go meet people just to talk bad about my dad. He would say all sorts of things to them about my dad, all of which were obviously lies. He was doing all of that to gather more enemies against my father but instead of his plans to work, they backfired.

Some of the people this man had gone to meet and lie to, approached my dad and told him everything. They all said they were surprised when they heard everything the man had said but that they all told him that my dad didn't look like the kind of man to do those things. So everyone he met with, automatically had my dad's back even though my dad wasn't friends with all of them.

Then my dad ended his story and told me that if he had been the kind of man who didn't respect himself and always fought in the middle of the street because of some checkers game, those people would had easily believed the lies that neighbour had told them and only God knows the amount of enemies my old man would have had.

He taught me that day that self-respect was very important and it really shouldn't be taken for granted.



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