The problems a shopkeeper chooses to see

A stationery shop near a school in Alexandria has a hundred problems on any given morning, and the owner sees perhaps four of them.

He sees the ones he knows how to handle. A customer wants a particular pen, he finds it. A delivery is short, he calls the supplier. These are quick, they are urgent, and fixing them feels like progress, because in a small way it is.

He also sees one he can do nothing about: rents in the street keep rising. He talks about it often. It is real, but it is a condition rather than a problem, since nothing he does will change it, and dwelling on it mostly leaves him tired and a little hopeless.

The problems he does not see are the slow ones. Parents now buy the whole term's supplies in one trip, somewhere else, before school starts. The teachers who used to send pupils to him with lists have retired. The window looks exactly as it did years ago. None of these shouts. Each of them could be worked on, and none of them is on his list.

This is not a failing peculiar to him. Most of us pick, without ever deciding to, the problems we feel at ease with: the ones we already know how to solve, the thrilling ones that can be solved by lunchtime, or the ones nobody could solve, so they are nobody's fault.

The ignored problems do not wait politely. They are still there, still working.

What decides his shop next year is not which problems exist. It is which ones get his hours this year.