Three kinds of mine

A family in Taif treats three spaces in three different ways, and nobody has ever had to explain the rules.

Inside the house, the choices are theirs. The sofa can be any colour. The spare room can fill up with boxes. If the kitchen is a mess on a Friday morning, that is their business.

The strip outside the front gate is different. Strictly it is theirs too, but they sweep it, water the small tree by the wall, and move the car when a neighbour has guests. They keep it up for the people who walk past.

And then there is what they throw away. The bag that goes into the big bin at the end of the road stops being theirs the moment it leaves their hand. From then on it belongs to everyone: the street, the town, whoever lives near wherever it ends up.

A business has the same three spaces, whether or not anyone notices.

The product, the shop and the brand are ours, and we can do as we like with them. How we show up in shared places is something we tend for others: the listing beside a rival's, the stall in a market that everyone relies on. And then there is the waste we produce. The message sent to a list that never asked for it. The claim that is not quite true. The notification nobody wanted. That lands on all of us, because each one teaches people to trust the next message a little less, including messages from sellers who did nothing wrong.

We are careful about the first kind of space and fairly good about the second. The third is the one we act as though somebody else will carry to the bin.