The Man Who Stopped Apologising for His Slowness

My grandson Kareem came to me frustrated last Thursday — the kind of frustration that sits behind the eyes and makes a young man look older than he is. He had been passed over for something at work. A younger colleague, quicker with the presentations, sharper with the jokes in meetings, had taken a position Kareem believed was his. He sat across from me at the kitchen table and said, with genuine bewilderment: "Sido, I always feel one step behind. Like everyone is running a race I did not know had started."

I poured him tea. I did not rush to answer.

There is a proverb we have — *il-mashi be-ahdan, yewsal be-amman* — the one who walks with care, arrives in safety. Kareem has heard this before, of course. We say it to children crossing streets and to drivers in rain. But proverbs are seeds. They need different soil at different ages before they open properly.

I told him about a man I once knew. Not a famous man. A porter named Abu Shaker who worked near the school in Shubra for thirty years, carrying boxes of textbooks up four flights of stairs every September when the new school year arrived. He was slow. Everyone knew it. The younger porters finished two trips to his one. The suppliers sometimes made small unkind remarks about it. Abu Shaker never argued. He simply continued.

What I noticed, over years of watching him, was this: Abu Shaker never dropped anything. Not once in three decades. The younger men — faster, louder, more impressive on the stairs — dropped things regularly. A corner of a box crushed. Pages bent. Once, an inkwell shattered across a whole corridor. Abu Shaker set each load down with a particular care, as if the thing he was carrying had some quiet dignity that deserved respect. Which, of course, it did.

When he finally retired, I shook his hand and asked him how he had learned to be so careful. He looked genuinely puzzled by the question. "I am not careful, Ustaz," he said. "I am simply not in a hurry to make mistakes."

I have turned that sentence over in my hands for forty years.

Kareem was looking at me with the expression young people wear when they suspect a story is arriving that will not solve anything immediately. I know this expression well. I taught it to thousands of students.

"The world," I told him, "has a serious love affair with speed right now. It is an infatuation, not a wisdom. Infatuations pass. What they leave behind is the question of what was actually built during all that rushing."

This is not an argument against ambition. I want to be clear. I was a headmaster. I have admired fiercely driven people. I drove myself. But there is a difference — and it is a difference worth spending a whole life understanding — between the speed that comes from clarity and the speed that comes from fear of being thought slow. One builds. The other only performs.

Kareem asked me: "But how do I stop feeling behind?"

I thought of Abu Shaker on the stairs. Of his unhurried back disappearing through the school doors each September morning.

I said: "You stop measuring your steps against someone else's staircase."

There is a particular discipline in this, and I will not pretend it is easy. It requires, first, that you develop enough trust in your own pace to stop apologising for it — inwardly, which is the place apologies do the most damage. The internal apology is the thief. It steals your concentration in the very moment you need it most, whispering that you should be somewhere else, moving faster, looking more impressive. When you silence that whisper — not by arguing with it, but by simply returning your attention to the thing in your hands — something shifts. Your work changes. Its texture changes.

Kareem was quiet for a while. Outside, Heliopolis was beginning its morning noise. A fruit seller, a car horn, someone calling up to a window.

"I am not telling you not to want things," I added. "I am telling you to want them at your own weight. A heavy want, carried calmly, arrives. A light want, carried in panic, spills."

He finished his tea. He did not say much more, which I took as a good sign. The young man who argues immediately has not yet heard you. The one who goes quiet is already somewhere on the stairs, adjusting his grip.

I watched him leave and then sat for a while with my own cup, thinking about Abu Shaker, who is long gone now, and the thirty years of boxes he delivered intact. A whole school educated, in part, on the books that arrived unbroken because one slow man refused to be embarrassed by his own care.

That is not a small life. That is, if we are honest, a very large one.

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