#resilience

For much of my life, I thought of suffering as something like weather. It arrived from somewhere outside me, often without much warning. There was not necessarily anything to do with it. You prepared as best you could, endured whatever came, and waited for the sky to clear. Anxiety could work this way. Depression could work this way. So could the obsessive replay of something that had happened already, or the anticipation of something that might happen and could not yet be influenced. The experience was not only painful in itself. Part of what made it painful was the sense that I was being acted upon. Suffering was a hurricane, and I was the house.

Over the last few years, though, something in that relationship has changed. The strange part is that the change has coincided with my deliberately introducing more pain into my life. I lift weights almost every day. I run a lot. Since getting rid of my car in late March, I have made walking, running, biking and public transit the machinery of ordinary mobility, sometimes adding a cargo wagon when I need to move more than my back can sensibly carry. There are now many more occasions on which my legs ache, my lungs burn, my muscles reach the point where they would strongly prefer that I stop, or I discover that the place I need to reach is inconveniently several miles away.

And yet I suffer less.

That sounds contradictory until I distinguish pain from suffering. The discomfort of a long run is perfectly real. So is the final repetition of a difficult set. There are moments when every physiological signal available to consciousness seems to be voting for rest. But those sensations do not feel anything like the old experience of psychological suffering. They can even feel life-giving while they are unpleasant. There is an odd simultaneity to strenuous exercise: I can want the hill to end while also being glad that I am climbing it. I can experience something that hurts without experiencing it as something bad.

A few days ago, after work, I ran home, got sweaty, got tired, got peaceful, and then took my dog for a walk through Wellons Village.

This was not an expedition.

I was not seeking danger, revelation, personal growth, or anything else that could later be packaged into a lesson. I had Solveig on the leash and nowhere in particular to be. She was in charge of navigation, which meant we were following the ancient canine transportation system of turning toward whatever smelled most promising.

This often takes us into Wellons Village.

Wellons Village has a reputation. People get shot there. Things happen there. I know this.

It is also ten minutes from my house, and Solveig knows, with the absolute certainty of a field biologist, that people in the area drop food on the ground.

So we go there.

That afternoon I was feeling remarkably good. The run home had burned off whatever static had accumulated during the workday. I was tired in the clean way. The world seemed basically acceptable.

Then Solveig found a chicken bone.

We were standing at an intersection waiting for the light to change. At the base of the crossing pole, amid the usual urban archaeology of wrappers, grit, and things a dog should probably not eat, there it was.

A chicken bone.

I was dealing with this important development when a man I had passed a minute earlier came back toward me.

I had barely registered him the first time. He had been talking to himself, or perhaps to somebody who wasn't there, or perhaps to the universe at large. In that part of town, this did not qualify as breaking news.

My last dawn in Baghdad smelled like diesel and jasmine. The generator across the alley coughed to life, competing with a night-blooming vine climbing our balcony. It was 2010, and I’d spent the previous week shuffling through visa papers while packing cocktail shakers between my clothes—because even fugitives of circumstance deserve stainless-steel style.

We’d survived the worst spikes of sectarian violence (2006-2008) by mapping alternate routes to school and rehearsing which uncle’s name to drop at each checkpoint. My kid brother turned it into a game: “Checkpoint Bingo—collect all five factions and win.” Humor is a last-ditch lifejacket; you cling to it when mortar whines replace lullabies.

People ask why I left. Officially: scholarship in Istanbul. Unofficially: I couldn’t stand seeing my favorite date-palm grove shrink behind blast walls. Creativity wilts when daily life is triage. I wanted fresh air for my ideas—and a bar scene that didn’t close at 9 p.m. because sirens said so. But I never stopped folding Iraq into every recipe.

In Istanbul I met Syrian, Yemeni, and Palestinian bartenders—each with their own exit-wound stories. We formed a chosen family called The Spice Route Syndicate and traded refugee hacks: how to stretch a paycheck, how to navigate embassy phone mazes, how to smuggle saffron in luggage without TSA confetti. Those hacks taught me agility—perfect practice for flipping drinks mid-air.

Close your eyes and picture a confetti-storm of color below the Indian Ocean’s surface—orange sea fans, violet brain coral, and neon-green anemones swaying like party streamers. Now open them to reality: Somalia’s reefs really do look like that, tucked along a coastline that runs about 3,333 km—the longest stretch on mainland Africa.

Most outsiders assume decades of civil war plus illegal fishing must have obliterated the reefs. Surprise: limited heavy industry and very little bombing at sea left large swaths of coral almost pristine. Regional surveys list at least 63 coral species across 27 genera, a respectable tally for the western Indian Ocean.

One headline find is an as-yet-unnamed pillar-coral relative—informally dubbed the “Somali pillar coral” by the research team that first photographed it near Marka in 2019. Genetic bar-coding suggests it’s a sister to Dendrogyra cylindrus of the Caribbean, but until scientists publish a formal description, it remains the marine equivalent of Prince’s “Love Symbol”—famous but technically nameless.

Local fishers have known these coral “gardens” forever and still use the ancestral nicknames their grandfathers coined: Garden of the Ancestors, Dragon’s Breath, Miracle Reef. That oral map has been priceless for biologists trying to GPS-pin hotspots.