The first ten minutes

There is a retired teacher in Alexandria whom dozens of her old students mean to visit. She lives in the same flat near the Corniche, she still remembers names, and everyone who goes comes away lighter. Nobody has ever left her door wishing they had stayed home.

And yet most of them do stay home. The visit is not hard. The start of it is. Finding a free afternoon, calling ahead, the traffic, the stairs, the awkward minute at the door when you wonder whether she will know your face. The friction sits entirely at the front, and the front is all we can see when we are deciding.

Plenty of things work like this. The reward is dependable and the cost is real but brief, and because the cost comes first, we keep putting it off. Sorting the receipts before the deadline is one. Asking the question we should have asked months ago is another.

The trick is noticing that the dread belongs only to the first few minutes, and that it is wrong about everything after. Ten minutes after the door opens, nobody is thinking about the stairs.

Most of us carry a short list of visits like this, real or otherwise. Each one is cheaper than it looks from the pavement, and better than we remember from the last time we finally went.

The door is usually closer than the dread suggests.