Still Here

I’ve been listening to Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony.

Beethoven went deaf a decade before he wrote it. The symphony opens in something close to chaos—fragmented, uncertain. I hear him searching for a key he can’t quite find. It stays there for a long time. Three full movements of struggle and tension before the choral finale arrives with the Ode to Joy.

The reason that ending has moved people for two centuries is that it doesn’t skip the darkness, it passes through it. The hope at the end is credible because the suffering was real.

I’m writing this from Dubai. It’s been two days since the conflict started. My family is safe. We have power, water, internet, food—everything we had on Friday. The UAE’s fantastic air defense has been intercepting all of the incoming missiles and drones, and the people running those systems kept millions of us safe.

I’m grateful for all of that in a way I couldn’t have understood a week ago. The past two days have had a texture I don’t have a reference for. Explosions, then silence. Shelter alerts on your phone in the middle of the night waking you up. Questions you don’t have good answers to. You check the news and Reddit, then close it, then open it again. There’s a hum of adrenaline underneath everything even when it’s quiet outside.

But I don’t want to write a post about how we’re fine. A lot of people aren’t. People lost their lives here, and many more across the region. Families are living through something I can’t begin to understand. People in have been under threat for decades. Hundreds of thousands of travelers are stranded, cut off from the people they were trying to get home to. There are people in this city who have family in places where the phones have stopped working. “We’re okay” is true for my household. I’m aware of how much that leaves out, and I hold all of them heavily in my heart and thoughts.

Over the past 48 hours, people I haven’t talked to in years have reached out. Old colleagues, clients, vendors, family and friends. From India, the US, the UK, Singapore, Germany, Australia, Canada, and of course all across the region. Not with anything particular to say—just to ask if we were okay.

Nobody’s message was polished. Nobody was performing concern. They just asked: are you safe? Is your family okay? Do you need anything? When things get real, people stop curating. They just reach out. The fact that people I’d lost touch with thought of us and paused whatever was going on in their own lives to send a message—that’s the thing I’ll carry from this.

I have enough normalcy right now to open a laptop and write this. A week ago I wouldn’t have noticed that as something to be grateful for.

I don’t have analysis to offer about what’s happening. I won’t pretend that my understanding of the geopolitics or where this goes is important. What I see is what’s in front of me: a city still functioning because people built defense systems that work and operated them under real pressure, while fasting, with their loved ones in danger. I have experienced a fragment of what an innocent civilian living in a warn-torn country lives through every day.

Beethoven wrote the Ninth while Europe was coming apart—revolutions, wars, authoritarian crackdowns. His own life was falling apart too. He was isolated, in pain, losing the one sense his life depended on. And from inside all of that, he wrote music that insists human connection and joy are still worth reaching for—not by pretending the darkness isn’t there, but by moving straight through it.

I don’t know what the next days or weeks look like. But people I hadn’t spoken to in years thought of my family. The systems held. My family is safe. And across this region, people are doing what people always do when things get hard—they reach for each other.

If you’ve reached out over the past two days—thank you. Whether I was able to express my gratitude appropriately or not, it really mattered and meant something to me.

If you’re somewhere going through something harder than what I’m describing—I’m thinking of you. If I can help, please reach out.