The weather on the day of the test

Two friends in Jeddah take their driving test in the same week. One gets a quiet mid-morning, an empty road and an examiner in a good mood. The other gets a sudden downpour, a lorry reversing out of a side street, and a stalled engine at the worst possible junction.

One passes. One does not.

Within a month, both have a story. The one who passed talks about himself as a natural, someone who simply has a feel for the road. The one who failed has decided he is nervous by nature, and he drives that way, braking early, hesitating at every roundabout.

Neither story is quite true. They drove about as well as each other. The weather and the timing did most of the deciding.

This is how much of what happens to us gets filed away. A result arrives, and we treat it as the only one that was ever possible. Then we work backwards to a reason, usually about our own character, and keep the reason long after we have forgotten the rain.

The trouble is that the reason does not stay in the past. The confident one takes risks he has not earned. The anxious one avoids roads he could manage perfectly well. A story about one morning starts steering a decade of driving.

It is worth asking, of any result we keep retelling, how much of it was us and how much was the weather. Not to dismiss the effort, or to excuse the mistakes, but because the account is ours to rewrite, far more than it feels.

Whatever we decide happened is what we will act on next.