Nobody asked her to paint the stairs

In an old building in Amman, a retired art teacher decided the stairwell was too grey to climb every day, and began painting it.

The objections arrived before the first flight was finished. Who said she could. Whether the landlord would mind. That it was not what people expect on a staircase. That it was too bright, then that it was not bright enough. That someone in another building had already done this, and that nobody in this one had ever done anything like it. That her lines on the third floor were less steady than the ones on the second.

Every one of those remarks is a way of asking the same thing: by what right are you trying?

The honest answer is none. Nobody is ever appointed to make a shared thing better. There is no office that hands out permission to improve a staircase, a neighbourhood, a recipe or an idea. And there is no promise attached. The colours might be wrong. The neighbours might never come round.

That is precisely why most stairwells stay grey. The work is not difficult. Waiting for permission that will never come is simply easier than doing something that could be criticised from every side.

What she did is generous in a way that is easy to miss. She spent her own afternoons and her own paint on a wall she does not own, for people who mostly complained. The building gained something whether they thanked her or not.

There is a kind of arrogance in starting without being asked, and she has it. Anything that ever got better needed someone with a bit of it. Do the work, accept that it will be judged, and paint the next flight anyway.