Everyone else seems to know

In the first weeks at a university in Amman, a student sits in a statistics class and watches the room.

The young man in front is nodding. The woman beside him writes steadily without looking up. Someone at the back asks a question that sounds clever. Everyone, it seems, can see where this is going.

He cannot, and he assumes that makes him the only one.

He is wrong about almost all of them. The nodder is nodding to stay awake. The steady writer is copying the board word for word because she does not yet follow a line of it. The clever question was rehearsed on the bus.

Learning looks like this from the inside, everywhere. We feel our own confusion directly and see only other people's composure, so we conclude that the rest of the room is walking in daylight while we feel for the wall.

The same is true of the places that are actually growing. A young business finding its first customers, a shop owner learning to sell online, a family starting a trade none of them has done before. Spend a day close to any of them and the confidence turns out to be thin. Underneath, people are guessing, checking, getting it wrong on Sunday and slightly less wrong on Wednesday.

Certainty is easy to find in places where nothing new is being tried. It is rare anywhere else.

So the feeling of fumbling forward is not a sign that he is in the wrong room. It is the room working as it should.

The dark comes with it.