By Dr. Bushra Hanon Mohsen / College of Islamic Sciences / University of Karbala

Life has taught us, with its sweetness and bitterness, what it means for all things to be meaningless, without value. Only then did we start to feel that the things that mattered to us yesterday no longer matter. We learned to be more dismissive and indifferent, and only then did we begin to feel a kind of happiness, but it was a different kind of happiness. It was the happiness of the simple person, content with life. Nothing around us excites us anymore, even though bad things still hurt us, but it’s a different kind of pain—lighter and less impactful. Only then did we begin to feel a sense of peace that has been growing day by day. Yet, with all this, we are haunted by the fear that the old nightmares might return, and we have the right to call them nightmares because they suffocated our souls for a long time. We don’t want them to continue in this way; they exhausted us, and we are desperately in need of a haven of peace.