I do not know how many wars I have lived through in this country.

Sometimes I try to count them, but the years and milestones blur together in my memory. What always comes back to me is the moment my mind decided was the beginning: the year 1987, when I first understood the meaning of the phrase “my knees gave out.” A shell landed on the house across from ours in the Patriarchate neighborhood in Beirut during a “mini-war” between the Progressive Socialist Party and the Amal Movement. I heard the sound of the rocket before it struck, as if it tore through my ears, and I learned what fear meant when my legs could no longer hold me upright.

After that came a long string of discoveries: the different kinds of sounds and their power, the terror, the gunmen, the massacres, the assassinations.

How heavy my memory is. From the rounds of fighting during the civil war and the repeated Israeli invasions, to all the battles that followed and unfolded between them. From Israel’s wars on the south to the internal clashes between “brothers” and rivals that would erupt suddenly and then disappear, leaving behind the dead, demolished homes, and troubling questions about politics and identity.

And yet here I am again, inside the same scene: another cycle of bombing and displacement, another round of fear for family and friends, for the house, for the people we love, and for the fragile hope that this country might somehow rise again after everything that has happened.

What weighs on the heart is not only the Israeli war and its cruelty, but also the feeling that we are living through repetition. As if history in Lebanon does not move forward but circles endlessly around itself.

The scenes we see today feel frighteningly familiar: images of collapsing buildings and destroyed homes, families standing before the rubble trying to understand what remains of their lives amid the devastation. Southern villages are turning into dust and debris that bury their streets and squares along with their memories, casting a pale gray over their neighborhoods and over the olive trees that now look like ash.

Entire families are killed under bombardment. Photos of children appear only after their deaths. As if their lives were suddenly reduced to a breaking news alert and a final image.

Nothing is heavier than the sight of a mother mourning her son, stunned and shattered, her eyes wide with disbelief.

Another image shook me as well: that of an elderly woman lost in the Raouche area. She stood among the tents of the displaced. The caption said she was from the town of Kfarfila, but she did not know where her children lived. Her gaze was bewildered, as if she were searching the passing faces for a thread that might lead her to a home, or to a memory that no longer held together as it once did. In her face, time itself was visible: a long time of wars, displacement, and losses that had passed over her life. How many times had she been forced to leave, to hide, or to wait for news of someone’s survival, until she lost the compass of her life?

For a woman at that age to end up not knowing where to go is a scene that captures something profound about Lebanon’s tragedy. It is a small country, but the weight of its painful memories is heavier than people can bear, until some lose themselves in its streets as if they were strangers in their own homeland.

But the repetition is not only in the images. Words repeat themselves too. The analyses now sound copied, like a memorized text everyone recites. Even I find myself repeating the same idea, as if I fear losing my own mind amid all this madness. Yet the abundance of explanations does not lighten the pain. Perhaps it does the opposite.

A strange feeling seeps into the soul. It is not only fear or sadness, but a kind of deep exhaustion. Exhaustion from the facts and images that repeat themselves, from the words that repeat themselves, and from trying to find meaning in wars that sometimes seem larger than our human ability to comprehend. Not because what is happening has no meaning, but because the meaning itself has become too heavy to carry.

At this moment, we stand at the mercy of decisions made by leaders far away from us and by powerful forces beyond our reach. And we stand with our country, the small country of Lebanon, once again on the edge of a dark fate. A country that has lived through so many wars that every generation carries the memory of a different one, and yet always finds itself facing another new war.

Our colleague Jana wrote a blog comparing how her parents dealt with life during war and her own experience. How sad it is that we inherit war from our parents, only to pass it on to our children, and perhaps to our grandchildren as well.

With every new war, we feel that something in this country becomes more fragile: the idea of stability, the idea of the state, even the idea that life can continue normally. But what is a normal life, anyway? I truly do not know what it means.

And yet, despite all this devastation, people still try to live another day. To protect those of their loved ones who remain, and to find, amid the violence, a small moment of life.

Perhaps this is the only meaning that remains in moments like these: to try to survive, and to hold on to what is left of our humanity, even when the world around us seems to have lost all meaning.