Things get very clear when death feels close.
Hearing missiles overhead, leaving the country overnight, and the lessons that only uncertainty can teach.
I was in Dubai when the airstrikes started.
Throughout the day we kept hearing loud booms in the sky. Drone interceptions. Missile interceptions. Deep, echoing blasts that rolled across the city. Growing up in Canada, war was never something I truly felt. It was something on the news. Something in documentaries. Something in history books. You hear about it. You read about it. But it never feels real.
Until it does.
The strange part at first was how your brain tries to stay logical. Dubai is a tiny part of the geography of the Middle East. Iran was attacking multiple countries. The strikes were reportedly targeting military zones. So the probability of something hitting us felt extremely small. Logic said we should be fine. But the booms kept happening. Every time you heard one, you paused for a second. You listened. You wondered where it landed. And then you went back to whatever you were doing.
Until one didn’t feel distant anymore.
A drone hit the Fairmont Hotel across from where I live. The explosion was right in front of us (me and Nadeem). We could see the fire. We could feel the ground shake. In that moment something changes inside you. The logic disappears. You realize how little control you actually have.
A drone doesn’t care about your plans. A missile doesn’t care about your schedule. It doesn’t care about your ambitions or the things you were worried about yesterday. If that drone had moved a few dozen meters in another direction, it could have been us. And suddenly death feels very real. When that happens, your brain recalibrates very quickly. Things that felt important a few hours earlier stop mattering.
This was the first realization - Death is a powerful forcing function.
It forces you to confront what actually matters. We often live our lives assuming we have time. Years. Decades. A full lifetime ahead of us. But the truth is we don’t know that. You can get cancer. You can get hit by a car. You can find yourself in the middle of a conflict you never expected to experience. That night we decided it didn’t make sense to stay. The situation was unpredictable. Maybe things would calm down. Maybe they wouldn’t. But we didn’t want to spend our days wondering if drones and missiles would be flying overhead.
That night we slept in our car underground in a parkade. And in that car, something interesting happened. Life became extremely simple. The biggest problem we were thinking about was when to turn on the engine for AC. Whether we were getting enough oxygen. Whether we should open the doors so CO₂ wouldn’t build up.
That was it.
When survival is the main objective, everything else becomes irrelevant. In those moments you become incredibly present. You’re not thinking about next year. You’re not thinking about long-term plans. You’re just thinking about right now. I imagine this is how people live during war. Focused on survival. Focused on making sure the people around them are okay. Everything else fades into the background.
The next morning the booms were still happening, although less frequently. We made a quick decision to leave the country. We found a driver who could take us to Oman. At the border we found another driver to take us to Muscat. From there we booked one of the only flights we could find out the next day.
We didn’t have much information.
We didn’t know if the conflict would escalate or calm down. We didn’t know how easy it would be to travel. We didn’t even know if we’d find transportation once we crossed the border. But we made the decision anyway. And we figured the rest out as we went. In the car we searched for flights. We figured out where to stay in Muscat. We figured out logistics step by step.
This was the second realization - You have to act on limited information.
Most people wait for certainty. They wait for perfect clarity before making decisions. But in many situations, that clarity never comes. You have incomplete data. You have ambiguity. And you still have to move. If you’re comfortable operating in uncertainty, you move faster than everyone else who is waiting for answers. When we arrived at the airport in Muscat, it was surprisingly quiet. There weren’t many people there. We boarded the flight and eventually landed in Nairobi. We’re here because we made decisions without having all the answers.
For those of you in cities like Dubai, I don't want to sound alarmist. The city seems generally safe, but we wanted peace of mind. We didn't want to hear loud noises overhead, we didn't want to wake up in the middle of the night to our phones ringing with a government alert.
During those hours in Dubai, things were happening around us that we had absolutely no influence over. Governments were making decisions. Militaries were acting. Systems much larger than us were moving. No amount of logic, emotion, or frustration could change that.
This was the third realization - Very little in life is actually in your control.
You realize how small you are in the grand scheme of things. But you also realize something else. There are small parts of life that you do control. And those parts matter a lot. You can control your decisions. You can control how you respond. You can control the direction you choose to move in.
Most of life is outside your control.
Which makes it even more important to take ownership of the parts that are. The worst way to live is just drifting in the stream. Letting circumstances decide everything for you. Time is the most valuable thing you have. Your experiences. Your present moments. The life you build through a series of those moments. You want to create future moments that you’re proud of. Moments where you look around and think, “Yes. This is the life I wanted to lead.”
That only happens if you make decisions for yourself.
After this experience, I feel a lot more empathy for people who live with war as part of their reality. People in countries like Syria, Afghanistan, Yemen, Palestine, Iran, Israel, Iraq, Ukraine, and many others. Millions of people live with this uncertainty all the time. They experience what it feels like to have forces much larger than them shaping their daily lives. To feel powerless. To hope things calm down. To turn to faith. To do their best to protect the people around them.
Experiencing even a small glimpse of that changes how you see the world. It reminds you how fragile life is. And it reminds you what actually matters. Your health. Your safety. The safety of the people you love. Everything else is secondary.
So if there’s one lesson from this experience, it’s this - Don’t wait for life to force clarity on you.
Choose what matters now.
Make the decisions that lead you toward the life you actually want to live.
Because the future is uncertain.
But the present moment is yours.
- Navid