“Zendagi migzara,” we say – life goes on.
I first read the phrase in a novel by Khaled Hosseini. On the page, it was brief, almost casual. Yet it lodged itself in my mind with the weight of something ancient.
It’s a truth we don’t always want to accept, especially in moments of loss or upheaval. Life moves forward with or without our consent. It does not pause for our grief, our heartbreak, or our hesitation. The sun rises, bills arrive, seasons turn. People continue to laugh in cafés even when your world has gone silent.
I’ve lived this phrase more than once. After personal loss, I remember the strangeness of returning to everyday routines — making tea, answering emails, hearing the faint hum of traffic. There was no grand announcement that I had survived another day. Just the quiet fact that I had.
Life going on is not always a betrayal of what came before. It is sometimes the only way to honour it. When we keep walking, we carry forward the people and moments we’ve lost. They live in our choices, in our kindnesses, in the way we approach the next chapter.
Zendagi migzara doesn’t mean forgetting. It means we learn to live alongside the memory, letting it shape us without letting it stop us. It is resilience without fanfare – the simple act of showing up to the next day, and the one after that, until living feels natural again.
There is a quiet dignity in that. Not the cinematic kind of strength, but the one that builds in silence – in the ordinary tasks, the small commitments, the slow healing that no one else can see.
Life will go on. And so will we.
