The first taxi in the line

At the airport taxi rank in Bahrain, you do not pick your car. You take the one at the front of the line. Old or new, chatty driver or silent one, it is yours.

Plenty of travellers prefer it that way. After a long flight there is relief in having nothing to decide. If the seat is torn or the air conditioning is weak, that is not your fault. You did not choose it. The rank did.

That relief is worth noticing, because people go looking for it well beyond airports. The job where someone else decides everything. The course where every next step is already printed in the handbook. The plan with another person's name on each decision, so whatever happens, it happened to us rather than because of us.

Choosing is tiring. Every choice carries the small weight of owning how it turns out, and handing that weight to someone else feels like rest. So we trade away a little freedom for it, often without noticing the trade.

But the choice has not gone anywhere. It has only moved earlier. Nobody made you queue at the rank. You could have booked a car, asked a friend, waited for the bus. Joining the line was the decision, and the torn seat is part of what you agreed to accept.

The same is true of the job, the course and the plan. Picking a path where others do the choosing is still a choice, and whatever follows from it remains ours.