The Ordinary Was Extraordinary All Along:
A Reflection on Loss, Appreciation, and Radical Hope from Gaza
by Aya Al-Hattab
_{Published in Solarpunk Magazine Issue #30 | November 10, 2026}

There are things I can live beside for years without really seeing them. The familiar sound of us calling to one another from our rooms. A mug of hot chocolate placed in front of me, served in my favourite unicorn mug. The sound of my colleagues talking while I try to finish a sentence. A morning lecture I have to attend in the middle of winter, when all I want to do is stay in bed. I think I hate it, until one day I realise how much I miss it. The colours and decorations in my home, which I grow so used to that they begin to seem ordinary, almost unremarkable. But when I suddenly lose them, I see them differently. They become vivid, special, almost magical, whether in my memories or in the photographs I look at later. Things that once seemed so ordinary can become extraordinary simply because I can no longer reach out and touch them.

I used to think appreciation meant recognizing something good after it happened: thanking someone for a kindness, celebrating an achievement, or remembering a happy day. I did not think much about the things that made up an ordinary day itself. Perhaps that is what makes ordinary life so easy to overlook. We become accustomed to its small comforts and begin to mistake their familiarity for permanence.

Living in Gaza has made that assumption difficult to maintain. Here, even the most ordinary parts of life can become uncertain. Plans change. I think about the lunch date I postponed with my boyfriend, who is now my fiancé. At the time, it felt like a small decision, something we could easily make up for another day. But then the war began, and seeing each other again became painfully difficult. Conversations are interrupted by explosions, and the future, which once seemed like a place I was gradually approaching, can feel impossibly distant. In many ways, I still feel stuck on 6 October 2023, the last day before the war, as though life has continued moving around me while a part of me remains there. I begin to notice things differently—not necessarily because I have become wiser, but because I have become more aware of how much I cannot take for granted.

“The life I knew before the war feels almost impossible to reach now.”

I have been thinking about appreciation lately, and about what the word means when life is shaped by uncertainty. I do not want to turn it into another lesson about resilience or suggest that suffering makes people better at recognising beauty. Pain does not need to be justified by whatever wisdom someone finds while living through it. Nor should anyone have to become grateful for the bare minimum of safety, dignity, or peace.

What I mean is that sometimes we do not fully understand how precious something is until we lose it completely, until it becomes something we can remember but can no longer experience. We grow so accustomed to the people, places, and little routines that make up our lives that we begin to believe they will always be there. We rarely imagine that one day, we might only be able to return to them in our memories or through photographs. And by the time we understand how much those ordinary things meant to us, we may no longer have the chance to live them again.

Before the war, my days followed a routine I rarely stopped to appreciate. I would wake up in the morning and drive to college, which was fifteen minutes away by car. I used to complain about the distance, especially because my school was only a five-minute walk from home. After college, I would go to the gym and then return home at around four in the afternoon. Some evenings, I would go out; on others, I would stay home reading a book, watching a film, or studying. It was an ordinary life filled with little habits and choices that I barely noticed because I assumed they would always be there.

I even used to complain about eating the same delicious food so often that I had grown tired of it. I never imagined I would miss it as much as I do now. I miss the routine I used to grumble about. I miss the places I visited without thinking twice, the books I read, the libraries I wandered through, and the cafés that felt like familiar parts of my life. I especially miss Seaside, my favourite café by the sea, where I would spend evenings with my sisters or friends. Back then, these things felt so ordinary that I rarely thought about how much they meant to me. I wish I had loved that life a little more while I was living it, and appreciated its places, its comforts, and the freedom to move through it without knowing how precious that freedom was.

The life I knew before the war feels almost impossible to reach now. So much of it has disappeared that sometimes I struggle to recognise the distance between who I was then and who I am today. It feels as though that life evaporated, leaving behind memories and photographs of places I once knew by heart. I can look at them and remember how it felt to be there, but remembering is not the same as living. And perhaps that is one of the hardest things about loss: realising that a life I once thought ordinary has become a life I can only revisit in my mind.

Sometimes, I wonder who I would be today if I had known how much I would miss that life. Would I have complained less about the drive to college? Would I have stayed a little longer at my favourite café, listened more carefully to the conversations around me, or looked at the sea for a few more minutes before going home? Would I have held on to the ordinary days a little more tightly if I had known they would one day become memories?

Hope is not asking us to be grateful for surviving what we should never have had to endure. It is asking us to keep believing that we deserve more than survival.

I cannot go back and give those moments the appreciation I wish I had given them. I can only look back at them now and understand that a life does not have to be extraordinary to be precious. Sometimes, its beauty is hidden in the very things we barely notice: a familiar voice calling from another room, a warm drink in a favourite mug, a book waiting beside the bed, a meal we have eaten a hundred times, or an evening spent with people we love without worrying about when we will see them again.

I do not want to believe that I must lose everything before I learn to love it. And I do not want appreciation to become another way of asking people to make peace with what should never have been taken from them. I miss my old life because it was mine. I miss the freedom to make plans without wondering whether I will be able to keep them, to go somewhere simply because I want to, and to imagine tomorrow as another ordinary day rather than an uncertainty I must learn to live with. None of these things should be luxuries. They are part of what it means to be alive.

Perhaps this is what appreciation means to me now: not pretending that the little things are enough to make up for everything I have lost, but recognising that those little things were never little at all. They were the texture of my life, the quiet details that made a place feel like home and a day feel like my own. They were the life itself, unfolding while I was busy living it.

And perhaps radical hope begins with that recognition. Not with the promise that everything will be restored, or the belief that every loss will eventually reveal a hidden gift, but with the insistence that ordinary life is worth protecting. That people deserve mornings without fear, evenings with their loved ones, classrooms full of questions, cafés by the sea, books to get lost in, and futures they can plan without being afraid to imagine them. Hope is not asking us to be grateful for surviving what we should never have had to endure. It is asking us to keep believing that we deserve more than survival.

I still think about the life I had before the war. Sometimes, I find pieces of it in photographs, and for a moment, the distance between then and now feels unbearable. But I am trying to see those memories not only as reminders of what is gone, but as reminders of what matters, of what I want to live again, and of what everyone deserves the chance to experience.

I cannot return to those ordinary days. I cannot step back into the person I was before I learned how quickly a life can change. But I can carry forward a deeper understanding of what those days meant—not because losing them was necessary, and never because the loss was worth it, but because they were precious all along.

One day, I hope, ordinary life will become ordinary again. I hope I will make plans without hesitation, complain about the distance to college, grow tired of my favourite meals, and spend long evenings with the person I love without knowing that we should be memorising every detail. I hope I will be so busy living that I will not have to think about how precious it is to live.

Until then, I want to keep noticing. I want to keep writing, learning, loving, and paying attention to the small things that remain—not because they erase what is missing, but because they remind me of the world I still believe in.

The life I miss was never asking to become a memory. It was simply asking to be lived. And that is the life I still hope for: not a perfect one, not a life untouched by difficulty, but an ordinary life that belongs to me, with all its familiar voices, small rituals, open doors, and unremarkable days. A life I can inhabit without fear, appreciate without grief, and look forward to without wondering whether it will disappear.

A life in which I no longer have to lose the ordinary to understand that it was extraordinary all along.

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