A situation, not a problem

When the power goes out across a block in Manama on a summer afternoon, there is a flurry of activity.

People call each other. Someone phones the electricity company three times. Someone else stands on the balcony studying the transformer as if looking at it might help. The engineers have been told. They will arrive when they arrive. Nothing anyone in the building does will bring them any faster.

That is not a problem. It is a situation. The one sensible response is to wait well.

Some problems are worth everything we have. Solving them makes something better, or puts us back on course, or gives us a chance to be generous to someone. But a good share of what we wrestle with is not like that at all.

Some of it, like the power cut, is simply weather. There is no move to make. The energy spent pretending otherwise is energy taken from something else.

And some of it is small on purpose. A shop owner spends a whole evening deciding which photograph goes first on her page, or rewriting the same short message to a supplier, or rearranging the shelf for the fourth time. None of it will change much. It feels productive. It is also very good at keeping her away from the harder question waiting underneath: why the customers who visit once do not return.

Small, safe problems are comfortable because they can be finished. The real one cannot be finished tonight, so it is easy to leave it in the corner while we polish something that does not need polishing.

The skill is not solving more problems. It is noticing which ones were never problems at all, and walking away from those.