Blame the move, not the bread

A family moves from Cairo to Dubai, and within a fortnight the complaints have a shape.

The bread at the supermarket is wrong. The tap water tastes of nothing. The air conditioning in the bedroom is too cold at night, and the children upstairs run along the corridor at the worst possible hour. Each complaint is true, and each one can be argued about over dinner for as long as anybody likes.

None of them is the real thing. The real thing is that everything changed at once, and a person who has had everything change at once carries an unease that needs somewhere to land. The bread is a convenient place. It is small enough to argue about and it never argues back.

Fixing the bread does not help. Another bakery, a water filter, a thicker blanket, and the unease simply walks on to the next detail. Upheaval on this scale is new to us. For most of human history, nobody changed country, school, language and neighbours in the same month.

What helps is saying it out loud. This is not about the bread. This is about the move, and the move is hard, and it was always going to be hard.

Customers who switch to something new behave the same way. They write in about the button, the colour, the delivery window. Sometimes it really is the button. More often it is the switch, and the useful reply is the one that names it.

Once the change itself has a name, the details shrink back to their real size, and there is room again to remember why anybody chose to come.