Who am I to suggest it

A man in a building in Salmiya has noticed that the morning school run is a mess. A dozen families, a handful of schools, every car pulling out at the same minute and joining the same queue at the same gates.

On the back of an envelope he has worked out a carpool rota. On any given morning, nearly half the cars could stay parked.

He has not shown it to anyone.

The reasons sound sensible. He has only lived there a year. Other families have been in the building far longer and have not fixed it. Who is he to tell his neighbours how to run their mornings? They might find it presumptuous. They might think he is showing off.

This feeling is everywhere, and it is good at passing itself off as humility. It tells us that stepping forward with an idea, or offering to take something on, is a claim to be better than the people around us.

It is not. It is an offer. He would be giving something away: his attention, his evenings spent on a spreadsheet, the small risk of hearing no. If the rota is a bad idea, the neighbours will say so and almost nothing is lost. If it is a good one, a dozen families get back a quiet quarter of an hour every morning.

Seen that way, the hesitation looks different. Keeping the envelope in a drawer feels modest, but what it actually does is keep something useful to himself.

And the person better placed to suggest it is unlikely to appear. Everyone else in the building is waiting for that person too.