It was not the pothole

A tyre bursts on the Ain Sokhna road, and the family on the hard shoulder knows exactly what to blame. That pothole a kilometre back. Everyone in the car felt it.

The pothole was simply where a long chain of small choices happened to end: the pressure nobody checked, the service postponed twice, the cheaper set bought at the last change, the boot loaded to the roof every summer.

The more useful lesson is not about the past. It is about where attention goes before anything has gone wrong.

We tend to give our care to the moments that feel like endings. The night before the exam. The morning of the launch. The final read of the proposal. The last hour before guests arrive. These moments feel decisive because they are close and tense, so they get the sweat, the checking and the sleepless night.

By then, very little is left to decide. The exam was passed or failed over months of study. The launch was made or broken by what was promised, and to whom. The evening was shaped by the guest list, not the napkins.

The decisions with real leverage come much earlier, and they arrive dressed as nothing. Which supplier to trust. Which person to bring in. Which question to settle now rather than later. Because nothing seems to be at stake, they get a fraction of the attention, and they are made in a hurry between more urgent things.

So the sensible way to spend one's care is the opposite of the instinctive one. When the final moment comes, ease off; it is too late to move much. Give the extra attention to the dull decision that does not look important yet, the one four or five steps back from the end.

That is where the tyre wore through.