One packet at a time

Pick up a packet of biscuits in a Kuwait City supermarket and there is nothing to notice. Same colours, same name, same spot on the shelf, a price that seems about right.

Now imagine a packet from each of the last several years laid side by side on a table.

The box has grown a little taller and a little slimmer. The row of biscuits inside, once snug from end to end, now stops short with a gap at the end of the tray. A word or two has crept into the ingredients. The price has moved in small steps that never felt like a decision. Seen together, it is plainly a story with a direction. Seen one at a time, it is just a packet of biscuits.

That is the difficulty with time. Any single moment looks ordinary. The meaning is in the sequence, and the sequence is almost never in front of us. We shop in snapshots. We remember last week, roughly, and nothing before it with any precision.

It is fair to ask whether time is hiding from us or whether we would simply rather not look. Laying out the packets takes no special skill. It takes the wish to see what changed.

The people who make the packet think in years. The people who buy it see it in moments. Most of what is decided about our choices happens in the space between those two ways of looking, and anyone who wants to understand where something is heading has to learn to watch the film instead of the frame.