Why Does One Pain Echo Louder? A Dispatch from Amman

After our trip to France, we returned to Amman.

We reached out, again, to Muna—our friend, our guide, our key to the spirit of the Levant. She had been the one who first helped us feel rooted here, beyond language or labels. We had a WhatsApp group once full of little joys: updates, coffee dates, shared walks in the sun. But this time, there were no walks. No coffee. The space between us was filled with grief.

Our passports are American, French, and Canadian. That alone shaped how we could move—or speak. Muna didn’t want to talk about October 7th. Not with us. Not yet.

She didn’t want to revisit the festival massacre. The hostages. The shattering violence that unfolded that day.

And she didn’t need to—because the aftermath was everywhere.

Schools, churches, mosques, homes—gone.

Cadavers beneath the rubble.

Famine and fear etched into orphaned faces.

Wounds too recent to name.

A few hundred kilometres across the Jordan River, she said, there was a genocide unfolding.

There was no need for press releases or pundits—

the truth was already on Instagram.

Unfiltered. Unedited. Unbearable.

What we won’t see, we won’t fix.

And now, people were not only losing friends to death—

they were losing them to silence.

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We craved connection. A few weeks into October, we attended a neighborhood fundraiser. A small gathering. Familiar faces. A lifeline.

There, we met Arwa Damon—former CNN correspondent and longtime reporter on the heartbreaks of the Middle East. Arwa carried the weight of witnessing. You could feel it in the way she stood. You could hear it in the pauses between her words.

She shared a practice she had learned, one she still returned to—especially when the weight of grief felt uneven.

“There’s an uncomfortable exercise I do,” she said.

“I ask myself: Why?

Why did this person’s pain move me more than that person’s?

Why did this death feel personal, and that one feel abstract?

Why did this story pierce me, and that one bounce off?”

She paused.

“I know,” she added, “it’s not a pleasant question. But it can shift how we see each other. How we hold each other.”

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Her invitation stuck with me. Still does.

So let’s do it now, together—if you’re willing.

Let’s turn inward. Not to scold ourselves, but to stretch the heart.

Let’s ask:

• Why does one pain echo louder than another?

• Why do some tears stir us, and others leave us dry?

• Why is it easier to mourn some children than others?

  
  

Let’s feel the unrest.

Let’s breathe through the chokes.

Let’s sit inside the discomfort without trying to solve it.

Because maybe—just maybe—

in the quiet that follows, a whisper of hope will find us.

Not a slogan.

Not a shortcut.

Just the tiniest opening in the walls we’ve built inside.

And from that opening, something softer might grow.

Not perfect. Not pure.

But more spacious.

More able to hold the many shades of human pain—without hierarchy.

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So here is the quiet question that now echoes in all directions:

What do we choose to witness—and what are we willing to let that witnessing change in us?

What truths are we ready to face without flinching?

Whose grief are we finally prepared to hold,

not as a burden, but as a shared human inheritance?

Next: Diary Entries for the Soul: On Writing, Masks, and the Brakes We Learn to Release

© 2025 Dominique Bel. Cardboard Wings: A Constellation of Becoming. All rights reserved.