“And then, suddenly, the sirens stop. Though the ballistic mid-air explosions didn’t get the memo right away.”

For almost two months, life in Israel was measured differently.

Not by meetings or milestones, but by seconds — the distance to shelter, the sound of alerts, the quiet calculations everyone now makes automatically: Where is the protected space? Who is with me? Who hasn’t answered their phone or WhatsApp message?

And yet, life did not really stop.

Schools closed. Airports shut down. Travel plans disappeared overnight. But cafés opened whenever possible. Businesses continued. Zoom meetings carried on — sometimes interrupted once, sometimes many times. Conversations paused mid-sentence, laptops closed, people moved quickly to shelter, and minutes later the meeting resumed.

It became strangely normal.

While we did our best to maintain family and life stability, observe two major holidays, and conduct local and global business as usual, a war made all this rather cumbersome if not difficult.

This was not life on pause. It was life lived in fragments — emails between alerts, strategy discussions between sirens, parents working while tracking their children’s locations. Entrepreneurs pitched investors after stepping out of safe rooms. Ordinary life persisted, repeatedly interrupted but never surrendered.

Perhaps that is one of Israel’s defining traits: we do not wait for stability to live. We live within instability.

War clarifies........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)