The corner and the hours

On the busiest corner of a shopping street in Taif there is a travel agency that has been there longer than most of the shops around it. The sign promises tickets and visas, and the painted lettering has faded to the colour of sand. Most days the two desks inside are empty. Hardly anyone walks into an office to book a flight now.

The rent on that corner cannot be small. Either the owner pays it out of habit, or the family owns the building and has stopped thinking of it as rent at all. Both lead to the same place. A space that a bookshop or a clinic would pay well for is being kept for a business the street has quietly moved past.

Nobody is wrong to be there. The owner has every right to the corner. The question is only whether this is the most valuable thing the corner could hold, and whether anyone has asked in years.

Most of us have a corner like that, and it is made of hours. A standing evening, a weekly routine, a role we took on once and kept, a project that runs because it ran last year. We own that time completely. We can put whatever we like in it.

But having used it one way for years is not a reason to keep using it that way. It only feels like one. The longer something has occupied a space, the less it looks like a choice and the more it looks like the walls.