Two brothers and no right answer

Two brothers run an optician's shop in Muscat that their father opened. The older one wants to stay open later in the evenings. The younger has small children and wants his evenings back. Their cousin works the counter, and he is wonderful with customers and careless with the paperwork, and both brothers are fond of him.

If the problem were the lens machine breaking down, there would be an answer. Someone would find the fault, order the part, and the machine would either work or it would not.

This is not that kind of problem. It never is, when it is about people.

Each of them is reasonable from where he stands. What the older brother needs from the shop is not what the younger one needs, and the cousin suits one half of his job and not the other. Put the three of them in a room and every conversation multiplies the ways it could go. A word that settles one brother unsettles the other. A rule that fixes the paperwork costs them the warmth at the counter.

People in that position often wait for the solution that will satisfy everyone, and the waiting is what wears them down. Each awkward week feels like proof that they have not yet thought hard enough.

But there is no solution of that kind. There are only paths, some better than others, none of them clean. Late opening two nights a month, as a trial. The cousin keeping the counter while someone else does the forms. Something good enough to try and easy enough to change.

Seeing it this way is a relief. If no perfect answer exists, then failing to find one is not a failure. The job becomes smaller and kinder: find the next step that the three of them can live with, and take it.