Our neighborhood in Doha

Recently, rockets lit up the sky over Doha, Qatar—right above our neighborhood no less. The same one you see in the above photo that I snapped with my iPhone just a few weeks ago. According to our Doha friends, the sound alone was enough to stop time–that peculiar whistle and boom that makes your heart forget its rhythm for a beat or two.

For those of you who may not know what I’m talking about, I’ll give you the skinny. Iran, in retaliation for the destruction of its nuclear facilities, launched fourteen rockets through Doha’s airspace, targeting the U.S. base there. Fourteen missiles–each one heavy with international tensions. For a few hours, the air itself seemed charged with possibility—the terrible kind that makes you realize how gossamer-thin the membrane is between an ordinary Tuesday and a history-making catastrophe. It looked like the start of a full-blown war, the kind that reshapes maps and rewrites the stories we tell our children about safety in the world.

But as we reached out to friends in the Middle East, as my husband worked his network of colleagues–voices carrying the calm of those who’ve weathered geopolitical storms before–it became increasingly clear that this retaliation was choreographed. A carefully orchestrated performance designed to allow Iran to save face while hopefully, mercifully, avoiding the war that no one with any sense actually wants. The rockets were real enough, their thunder genuine, but the dance they were part of was a diplomatic ballet performed with weapons instead of words.

All of this unfolded less than twenty-four hours before my husband and our middle daughter were scheduled to board a plane for Doha, leaving me behind to shepherd our youngest through that sacred, terrifying threshold into university life. For a while there, suspended in that strange liminal space between decision and action, it didn’t look like they were going to go. We found ourselves gaming out scenarios, weighing the weight of “what if” against the lightness of “but probably not.” Yet lo and behold, things simmered down as quickly as they came to a boil, like a pot of soup pulled from the fire just before it bubbles over. Life resumed its forward motion as if nothing had happened, as if the world hadn’t just reminded us how quickly everything can pivot on the axis of someone else’s decision.

It was a whirlwind—the kind that leaves you dizzy not from spinning, but from the sudden stillness that follows.

There’s nothing more still than our Virginia backyard, except during a thunderstorm, of course.

A few months ago, I asked a Doha friend of mine—a Polish professor of literature with a love for complicated novels and pitch-black humor—what her plans were for the summer. Her answer arrived like a small revelation: “Since COVID,” she said. “I don’t make any plans.” Even when she buys a plane ticket or arranges a rendezvous, she no longer has any expectations about them, treating any realized plan as a pleasant surprise, a gift from a universe that owes her nothing but occasionally chooses to be kind.

Her words came flooding back to me as we sat in our bedroom, half-packed suitcases like question marks scattered across the floor, contemplating what those Iranian rockets could mean for our lives, for our collective sense of safety and well-being. The weight of it pressed hard, especially knowing that my husband and I will soon both be living in our Doha high-rise again. A place that’s about as different from our old Virginia home as a glass tower is from a garden, all vertical lines and reflected light where we once had sprawling rooms that breathed with the seasons. Our middle daughter will return from her Doha adventure and she and the rest of our children will remain in the United States. Our son, our firstborn who once fit in the crook of my arm, is now an officer in the Marine Corps, uniformed and trained and entirely capable of finding himself drawn into the very conflicts we watch unfold.

Yet, even as my mind catalogued all the ways this could go wrong, I felt something unexpected: a strange sense of peace and faith settling over me. It was the same preternatural calm that has visited me during other storms in my life, after other whirlwinds have torn through the landscape of my carefully constructed plans. The steadiness that held me when I moved to Prague with nothing but hope and a few hundred bucks. When I fell in love with my husband in a way that defied every rational timeline I’d ever imagined for myself. When I held healthy children in my arms and marveled at their perfect fingers and toes, and when I later held a very sick child and learned that love can expand to accommodate terror without breaking.

It was there again last year when opportunity knocked with the subtlety of a sledgehammer, and we decided to move across the world—literally across the world—and had about a month to make all of that happen. A month to sort through a lifetime of accumulated belongings, to say goodbye to a place that had been home for twenty years, to leap into the unknown with nothing but a deeply held belief that the net would appear.

These moments, strung together like prayer beads on an old rosary—are a reminder that life isn’t something to be plotted and predicted with architectural precision. Life is dynamic, gloriously and sometimes jarringly so. It’s the physical manifestation of a universal spirit that’s constantly challenging us to grow, to understand, to love more deeply and with less condition. It asks us, again and again, to surrender our illusion of control and live the story that has been written for us by the ultimate author of our existence.

Our monastery in Virginia

And perhaps that’s the real lesson of the rockets over Doha—not that the world is dangerous (we knew that already), but that our response to danger is where our true power lies. In the space between the whistle and the boom, between the plan and its dissolution, between the fear and the faith, we discover who we really are when everything we thought we could count on suddenly becomes negotiable.

The rockets have fallen silent now. The planes are flying again. My husband and daughter boarded their flight and waved goodbye. They’ve already had dinner at our favorite Doha restaurant, and plunged their feet into our apartment pool while enduring the ungodly heat. Somewhere in Spain, where she’s spending the summer, my Polish friend will continue not making plans, finding joy in whatever small surprises the universe chooses to offer.

And I will remember that this, too—this moment of not knowing, this space between breath and release—is exactly where I’m supposed to be.