Strawberries in midsummer

In a supermarket in Muscat, in the hottest part of the year, there are strawberries from one continent, blueberries from another and mangoes from a third, stacked side by side under cold lights.

Not long ago, a grandmother in this city would have thought this impossible. Fruit came in its season, from somewhere you could almost see, and when the season ended, it ended.

Now a shopper picks up a punnet, spots one soft berry, and puts it back with a sigh. Too expensive. Not as sweet as last month. Why is there never a ripe avocado?

Nothing about this is unusual. We get used to a wonder astonishingly fast, and once we are used to it, we begin to grade it. The cold aisle that would have amazed a previous generation becomes the baseline we complain against. Each time, the getting-used-to happens a little quicker, and the next marvel has to be a little bigger just to register.

That is a staircase with no top step. Anyone who depends on the shelf to keep amazing them will end up disappointed, because no shelf can outrun the speed at which we stop seeing it.

The alternative does not need anything new to arrive. It only needs us to put the expectation down for a moment and look at what is already there: a berry grown on the other side of the world, carried across the sea, cold in your hand in a desert summer.