Measured in spilt bottles

A small olive oil maker outside Amman sells from a folding table at the weekend. Her labels are handwritten, and she rewrites the price card three times before anyone arrives, worried that a smudge or a wrong word will make her look like an amateur.

Fear does not come with a scale. A misspelt label and a failed harvest arrive in the body as the same tightness, and so we treat them with the same seriousness.

It helps to borrow a unit from ordinary life. She knows exactly what a spilt bottle costs her: a little oil, a mopped table, a shrug, and a sale later that afternoon to make up for it. It is a loss she has absorbed many times without losing sleep.

Now measure the smudged price card against it. Is it worth more than one spilt bottle? Almost certainly less. A shopper who notices a crooked letter has forgotten it before reaching the car. The question she was too nervous to ask the seller at the next table, the slightly awkward way she described her own oil, the day she wore the wrong scarf for the weather: each comes in at a fraction of a bottle.

The genuinely large risks are still there, and they deserve the worry. A late frost, a bad pressing, a buyer who never pays. Those run to hundreds of bottles, and planning for them is sensible.

But most of what keeps small sellers awake at night would not fill a cup.

Once you start pricing your fears in something you have already survived, it becomes difficult to stay solemn about them. The smudge is just a smudge, worth about a teaspoon.