Nobody is watching the sign

A man who runs a small framing shop in Muscat has wanted to change the sign above his door for three years.

The old one carries his father's lettering and a list of services he stopped offering long ago. The new one would be simpler: one word, the thing he actually does well. He has the design. He has the quote. What he does not have is the nerve, because he is sure people will notice. The neighbours will ask. Regulars will wonder whether something has gone wrong.

They will not.

Most of the people walking past have never read the old sign. The regulars come for him, not for the board above him. The few who do spot the change will register it for a second and then go back to their own day, which is full of their own signs and their own worries.

This is true of almost every change we rehearse at length. A new price list. A shorter opening hour on a quiet afternoon. Dropping the product nobody buys. Wearing something different to the same place we go every week. In our heads it is an announcement. Outside our heads it is barely a footnote.

The commotion we fear is mostly a recording that plays only for us. We care about our own consistency far more than anyone else does, because nobody else is keeping the record.

If the change is useful, and kind to the people it touches, it does not need a launch. It just becomes the way things are, and within a month nobody remembers it being any other way.

He could not make a fuss about the new sign if he tried.