Eleven years of the same breakfast

A man in Jeddah has eaten the same breakfast at the same fava bean stall every Friday for eleven years. Same bowl, same bread, same stool, same nod to the man at the pot.

Somewhere along the way he stopped tasting it. Not deliberately. There was no morning on which he decided to stop paying attention. It simply wore away, the way the noise of a road outside a window wears away. His body still arrives at seven. The rest of him is somewhere else.

This happens in much bigger places than breakfast. A career, a city, a marriage, a way of spending money, a way of being treated. We keep turning up. We stop noticing, then we stop appreciating, and eventually we stop choosing at all. Habit makes the decisions, and we sign them without reading.

Nobody looks absent from the outside. That is the trouble. It can last a week or a decade, and nobody, least of all us, raises the alarm.

Waking up does not need anything dramatic. It needs the nerve to make a choice again. To ask, this Friday, whether this is the breakfast he wants, and to be willing to hear the answer. Perhaps it is. Perhaps it is the stall across the road, or a different dish, or a different morning altogether.

That is uncomfortable, because a choice can be wrong and a habit never has to be. Choosing means owning the result, and owning it is a little frightening.

The fear is the price of being awake, and it is worth paying. A habit can carry you a long way, but it cannot notice anything for you.