Room at the front

It is not hard to list what feels shaky right now.

Prices are moving faster than wages. Trust in institutions, in news, in each other, is thin. Offices that used to anchor a working week sit half empty. The old routes, a degree then a job then a promotion, look less certain to the people walking them. Plenty of families across the region are making careful choices about what they can afford to try.

It is just as easy to list what is newly possible.

A person with a phone in a small town can sell to customers three countries away. Someone can learn a trade from strangers, for free, late at night. A group of people who care about the same odd thing can find each other in an afternoon and organise around it. Tools that once needed a company now need a laptop. Medicine, farming and energy are changing in ways that would have sounded like fiction to our parents.

Both lists are true at once. That is what a crossroads looks like.

At moments like this, most people wait. They wait to see which road the others take, for the uncertainty to settle, for permission. It is a sensible instinct and it leaves the front of the line almost empty.

Which means the opening is not for the person with the most money or the best credentials. It is for whoever is willing to choose a direction, say so in public, and start walking before the map is finished.

There has rarely been more room for that person. Someone has to go first.