As if he could leave

In an upholstery workshop in Amman there is one craftsman whose stitching customers ask for by name. A bigger furniture maker across the city would hire him tomorrow, and everyone in the workshop knows it.

The owner wonders whether to ask him if he is looking. The craftsman wonders whether he ought to be.

Both questions are understandable, and both lead somewhere unhelpful. If the owner asks and hears yes, he starts planning for the day the man leaves, and the trust between them thins. If the craftsman spends his days half-listening for a better offer, every chair in front of him gets compared with a perfect job that exists only in his head.

There is a better arrangement, and each of them can choose it alone.

The owner can simply assume the answer is yes. Someone this good always has a door open somewhere. So the job is to give him a reason to stay that renews itself every morning: fair pay, real respect, the interesting commissions, his name spoken when customers admire the work. Loyalty is not something the owner is owed for having hired him once. It is something he earns again each day, or loses.

The craftsman can take the opposite assumption. Today, he is staying. Not as a vow, just as a way of working. The sofa on his bench gets all of his attention instead of a share of it, and the hours pass the way they do when a person is absorbed in something worth doing.

Nothing is locked in. He can think again next month, and the owner knows it.

The owner acts as though the man could leave. The man works as though he never will. Both are better off for the pretence.