The water tank argument

The residents of a building in Amman have a group chat, and this week it is about the water tank on the roof.

One flat thinks it should be cleaned every month. Another thinks twice a year is plenty and monthly is a waste of everyone's money. A third assumed the landlord did it already. Two people who have shared a stairwell for eleven years have stopped replying to each other.

What surprises everyone is not that strangers disagree. It is that the people they know, the ones they assumed were like them, see it differently. That has always been true. Living this close to everyone's opinions, all day, has simply made it impossible to miss. Nobody holds exactly the same picture of the world as anyone else, including the family in the next flat.

The usual response is to dig in, or to quietly write the other person off. Neither gets the tank cleaned.

There is a harder and better step, and it begins with a question rather than an answer. What does the woman in flat four know that I do not? What is she worried about that I have never had to worry about? Perhaps her child was ill one summer. Perhaps her budget is tighter than it looks.

Asking does not settle the argument. It does something more useful. It reminds us that the other person has not seen what we have seen and does not carry what we carry, and that their head is as full of noise as ours.

Once that is clear, there is usually a shared aim underneath, water nobody has to worry about, and a way to reach it together.