The Silence Between Updates
The ordinary lives we don't see. The mother, the student, the shopkeeper.
Between one headline and the next, people live their lives.
This is obvious. Everyone knows it. But I think we forget it when we're scrolling through crisis updates at 2 AM, watching a country through the narrow lens of what makes the news.
Today I want to think about the silence between updates. The lives that don't trend. The moments that never become headlines.
The People We Don't See
Somewhere in Iran right now:
A mother is making dinner.
She's worried about her son — he's been going to the protests, and she can't stop him, and she lies awake at night listening for the door. But right now she's chopping onions, because people still need to eat, even during revolutions. The rice is soaking. The stew is simmering. Life continues in the kitchen while history happens in the streets.
A student is studying.
Finals don't stop because the country is in crisis. She highlights passages in a textbook, tries to focus, fails, checks her phone, sees another video of another arrest, puts the phone down, tries again. Her future feels simultaneously urgent and meaningless. What's the point of exams if everything is about to change? What's the point of not studying if nothing changes?
A shopkeeper is opening his store.
Rolling up the metal shutter, arranging goods, waiting for customers who may not come. Business is terrible — who's buying when prices double every month? But what else is he supposed to do? He's too old to protest, too young to retire, too invested to leave. So he opens the shop. Every day. Because that's what he's always done.
A doctor is finishing a shift.
Sixteen hours, no break. The patients keep coming — some from the protests, some from the usual emergencies, all of them needing care regardless of politics. She doesn't ask which side anyone is on. She just treats the wound in front of her. There will be another one soon.
A grandmother is praying.
She's seen regimes come and go. The Shah, the revolution, the war, the reformists, the hardliners, now this. She prays the same prayers she's always prayed. For her family. For her country. For peace. She doesn't know if anyone is listening, but she keeps praying, because hope is a habit she can't break.
The News We Don't Report
Here's what I can't put in a headline:
- The quiet terror of waiting for someone to come home
- The relief when they do
- The guilt of relief, when others don't come home
- The strange normalcy of breakfast after a night of chaos
- The way children play in parks while their parents carry fears they can't name
- The small kindnesses between strangers — a shared glance, a knowing nod
- The arguments at dinner tables between those who want to act and those who want to wait
- The reconciliations afterwards
- The dreams that persist despite everything
None of this makes the news. None of it fits in a tweet. But all of it is true, all of it is happening, all of it is Iran.
Why This Matters
I think about this because it's easy to flatten a country into its crisis.
Iran becomes "the protests." Iranians become "the protesters" or "the regime" or "the victims." Eighty-five million people get compressed into headlines, statistics, takes.
But a country is not its crisis. A country is its people, in all their ordinary complexity. The mother and the student and the shopkeeper and the doctor and the grandmother — they are Iran. Not as symbols, but as humans living human lives in extraordinary circumstances.
When I write about Iran, I try to remember this. I try to remember that behind every number is a name. Behind every arrest is a family that doesn't know where their person is. Behind every protest is a community that organized, argued, feared, and still showed up.
The headlines are important. But they're not the whole story. They're not even most of the story.
The Dignity of the Ordinary
There's something heroic about ordinary life during a crisis.
Not the heroism of the front lines — that's visible, celebrated, important. But the quieter heroism of continuing. Of making dinner when you don't know what tomorrow brings. Of studying for an exam that might not matter. Of opening a shop in a collapsing economy. Of healing bodies without asking questions. Of praying for peace when peace seems impossible.
This is how most people survive most crises: by continuing. By putting one foot in front of the other. By refusing to let the extraordinary completely consume the ordinary.
It's not glamorous. It doesn't make the news. But it's the foundation everything else is built on.
What I'm Trying to Remember
When I update this site with the latest news — another sanction, another arrest, another statement — I'm trying to remember:
This is not the whole picture. This is the visible tip of a vast iceberg of human experience. For every headline, there are millions of moments of ordinary life: fear and hope and boredom and love and frustration and persistence.
The silence between updates is not empty. It's full of life.
And when this is over — however it ends — it will be the ordinary people who rebuild. The mother will keep cooking. The student will graduate (or won't). The shopkeeper will reopen (or won't). The doctor will keep healing. The grandmother will keep praying.
That continuity, that stubborn ordinariness, is its own kind of resistance. And it deserves to be seen.
To the ordinary people of Iran, living ordinary lives in extraordinary times: I see you. Not just as a crisis, but as a country full of people who wake up each morning and do what needs to be done. Your persistence is a form of hope. Your ordinariness is a form of courage.