The children unpack first

When a family moves from Cairo to Dammam, the children are usually the first to unpack.

Within a fortnight they have new friends, a favourite corner of the compound, a few words of a new accent and an opinion on which supermarket has the better bread. They were miserable on the first night and fine by the third. Switching does not seem to cost them much.

The parents take longer. They keep driving the long way because it was the first way they learned. They miss a shop that was ten minutes from the old flat. Every new routine is a small negotiation, and a year later some of those negotiations are still open.

It is easy to call this age, and partly it is. The ease of landing somewhere new does seem to fade as we get older.

But watch the adults who do it well. They are rarely the youngest. They are the ones who have kept the habit alive: they try a different route home now and then, eat somewhere they have never eaten, take on a task they are not good at, change a routine before it hardens. They have treated flexibility as something to keep in shape, the way you would a knee after an injury, and so it is still there when they need it.

That holds for more than families. A household, a shop, a group of friends running something together: each of them gets better or worse at changing depending on how often it practises.

The ground is not going to shift any more slowly. The ones who will be fine are not the ones who were born adaptable. They are the ones who decided it was worth practising, and did.