Quiet courage of ordinary people can rebuild a world in crisis

My son, who is almost four, has recently become obsessed with the universe. He can recite the planets of the solar system and tell anyone who will listen that Pluto – his favourite – was once a planet but was reclassified as a “dwarf planet” in 2006. Now that he has a sense of scale and size, he has developed a habit of comparing everything: an ant is smaller than a leaf, the Earth is smaller than the sun, the sun is just a dot in the galaxy, and the galaxy is a tiny part of the universe. “And we are the people on Earth,” he said one evening as we looked at a picture of the Milky Way. “So we are very small. We are like ants.” His logic was impeccable. His conclusion was unexpectedly philosophical. Being a mother is a process of growing together with your children: discovering how their fresh eyes can become our own source of enlightenment. A simple idea from a child can unlock a perspective we, as adults, have forgotten. My son’s intuition – that human beings are small and vulnerable – has never felt more painfully true than it does today. As 2025 draws to a close, the global landscape is scarred by crises whose scale dwarfs individual lives. Armed conflicts, humanitarian catastrophes and geopolitical confrontation have all made individuals feel smaller than ever, as if ordinary people are merely specks, swept aside by the shifting plates of power. Cities have been destroyed. People have died or been displaced, with many living in temporary shelters, their futures suspended in uncertainty. Each day, new casualty numbers appear, but behind every statistic is a person whose story will never be fully told. This has been another year in which human beings, real people with families, memories and dreams have all too often been reduced to casualty numbers, geopolitical bargaining chips or nameless victims in breaking-news alerts. When the Ukraine crisis erupted in early 2014, I was standing in Kyiv’s Independence Square, reporting from the heart of the protests. I followed the conflict as it unfolded across the country, travelling from the west to the east and spending long stretches on the front lines between 2014 and 2016. I remember welcoming the New Year of 2015 inside a shelter with displaced residents from Donetsk. Together, we made a simple wish – that they would soon be able to return home. I never imagined that 10 years later, the situation would have deteriorated so much. I often think of the people I met and interviewed back then: the flower shop owner, the newly married couple, the primary teacher, the doctors, the soldiers on both sides. I hope they are still alive. In Gaza, the conflict drags on with devastating relentlessness. Entire neighbourhoods have been flattened. Access to food, water and medical care remains dangerously compromised. More than 70,000 Palestinians have been killed since October 2023. The world sees images of children dug out from the rubble or waiting in overcrowded hospitals. However, political solutions remain as distant as ever. To survive each day is already an act of resistance. Across Africa, conflicts that attract little global attention continue to uproot millions. In Sudan, civil war has devastated its capital, Khartoum, and caused one of the world’s largest displacement crises. In the Sahel, armed groups clash with government forces, leaving villages burned and populations scattered. These crises seldom dominate headlines, not because the suffering is less severe, but because those caught in the crossfire lack geopolitical leverage. They disappear into the margins of international attention. It seems that ordinary people bear the consequences of decisions made that are removed from their control. They are, in my son’s words, “like ants” – small, unprotected and easily swept aside. And yet, the comparison to ants has another side that offers hope. When I was a child, I loved watching ants in our courtyard. I could sit on the ground for hours observing them. I watched them emerge from little cracks in the soil, searching for food. I watched them carry crumbs many times their size. Most of all, I watched them build. In the corner of the wall, they would start forming a little nest – pushing up grains of sand until the mound stood two or three centimetres tall. And, like many mischievous children, I would knock it down. A sweep of the hand was all it took to erase their work. But the next day, they would start again, and again. Every time I destroyed their nest, they rebuilt it from scratch. They did not seem disheartened. They simply continued, with no expectation of reward and no illusion that they could resist a force much larger than themselves. Perseverance was not a choice; it was their instinct to survive. They refused to surrender their purpose. As we look towards 2026, will it be better? I don’t know. Few believe that the world’s major conflicts will end quickly. Many fear the emergence of new economic, environmental and political crises. The world feels fragile, fragmented and unpredictable. But I do know this: smallness is not the same as helplessness. Like ants, we can still choose to build. To protect. To care. To insist on dignity even when the world feels merciless. We may be small, but we are not powerless. The quiet courage of ordinary people remains one of the few forces that can still hold the world together.

Quiet courage of ordinary people can rebuild a world in crisis

.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}It’s easy for us to feel powerless as deadly wars rage on, but the resilience of ordinary men and women gives us hope for the new year

It’s easy for us to feel powerless as deadly wars rage on, but the resilience of ordinary men and women gives us hope for the new year