In times of crisis, individuals—and nations—can become overwhelmed by details, and then by the details of those details. Attention becomes focused on marginal victories here and there: a village is recaptured, a tanker makes it through, a pipeline stops for a day and then resumes. And the broader picture disappears.

Worse still, dealing with the details can serve the objectives of new battles that deliberately alter the overall picture. Not every front is a continuation of the original war. Some are opened precisely so that the original war is no longer visible.

This is the world we live in today.

The war between the United States and Iran began with a desire to break Iran’s will and its proxies’ ability to threaten Israel, and perhaps to bring down the Iranian regime. Then the question shifted—whether by design or by necessity—to the Strait of Hormuz, then to the Yemeni coast, then to the Saudi oil pipeline crossing the Arabian Peninsula, and then to gasoline prices in an American state that will hold elections in a few months.

Each transition appears logical in its immediate context.

Taken together, however, these transitions move the conflict away from decisive resolution and toward managed attrition.

Those who look from above do not see three separate headlines. They see an architecture designed to fragment attention.

Power in the twenty-first century is no longer measured solely by the number of missiles, the size of GDP, or the rhetoric of victory in the evening news. It is measured by a system’s ability to remain itself after the map beneath it has changed.

Iran has suffered enormous losses—in its economy, its currency, and in the lives of its people. Yet it retains one harsh advantage: its authorities do not need the Iranian public’s approval in the short term. And despite Israeli and American intelligence penetration of the Iranian system, the regime has not collapsed.

The United States is incomparably more powerful, but it enters the winter with an American voter who judges by the price at the pump rather than by the narrative.

The Gulf states have built their ambitious development projects on the stability of energy exports and the calm of maritime routes. If the route is shaken, the entire project is shaken with it.

Here the deeper meaning of what some call the “battle of the narrative” becomes clear.

Narrative is not propaganda floating above reality. Narrative is the framework through which facts are arranged until they appear to constitute an entirely different war.

Whoever imposes the framework imposes the standard by which victory and defeat are measured.

If you convince the world that the battle is about “who controls the opening of Hormuz,” you have already won the war if the strait passes even a fraction of its previous traffic—because the passage was open before the war.

And if you convince the American voter that the conflict is his or her own battle, that the daily details of one victory here and another there are what matter, you may win Senate elections and allow Netanyahu to remain in power despite the crimes attributed to him at home and abroad.

Details have become selectively chosen because they change the standard itself.

The Houthis are not a footnote in this landscape.

They are an instrument for changing the framework.

Twenty years of fighting have produced an organization that knows the terrain and understands the patience of wealthier adversaries. Comparing the Houthis with the Taliban is not an insult to either side. It is a reminder that wars that cannot be settled through occupation are ultimately settled through exhaustion or negotiation.

Trump, who negotiated with the Taliban after concluding that a decisive military victory was impossible, now faces a more dangerous question:

Will he open a fourth front in Yemen when he has not yet closed the first one in Iran?

His refusal to strike immediately—if confirmed—is not necessarily a sign of military weakness. It may instead reflect an understanding that every new missile produces a new headline, and every new headline creates a new front in the consciousness of peoples, even when it does not create one on the map.

The danger to Saudi Arabia is twofold.

The first is material: Western energy supplies pass through Saudi territory and waters.

The second is political and civilizational. A grand transformation project cannot survive for long on fragile infrastructure and a proxy war that seeps in simultaneously from Iraq and Yemen.

Anyone who wants the Gulf to remain a corridor rather than a battlefield must understand that verbal neutrality does not protect an oil pipeline, and that American military protection is not an unlimited blank check without political costs in Washington.

Europe, meanwhile, enters the winter as it usually does: an energy consumer, divided in its narrative, searching for morality in a war it did not create and for fuel in a war it may ultimately lose.

Its details will be about gas reserves and inflation rates.

The broader vision is missing:

Energy security is no longer a technical file. It has become an extension of the struggle of wills stretching from Tehran to Bab el-Mandeb.

So what should we do if we do not want to remain prisoners of the daily headline?

We must return to the big questions before they are swallowed by the small battles.

The question is not:

Who won this week along the Yemeni coast?

The question is:

Who can survive five years inside a war that neither closes its strait, nor topples its regime, nor reassures its voters?

The question is not:

Has the flow of oil fallen to one-third of its previous level?

The question is:

Do the producing states still have a development project if they are transformed from sources of prosperity into cheap targets for drones striking here and there?

The question is not:

Should a militia be struck or left alone?

The question is:

Has the great power understood that some adversaries cannot be defeated because they are not fighting on the chessboard that defense ministries have drawn for them?

The middle class in the West will judge by prices.

The elites in Tehran will be judged—if they are judged at all—by survival.

And the people caught between the two will pay the bill for details that were carefully selected so that the full picture would remain unseen.

I have written repeatedly that the international system is not becoming multipolar so much as it is fragmenting.

Fragmentation does not mean the emergence of equal centers of power. It means the proliferation of small fronts that exhaust the center and tempt the periphery into believing that they are making history, when in reality they are often instruments for changing the framework.

The war today is a living example.

Every marginal victory is announced in a statement.

Every real victory is postponed until the coming winter, the ballot box, or negotiations that take place only after those who once believed they could not be exhausted finally are.

A comprehensive vision is not a luxury for intellectuals.

It is a condition for survival.

Those who drown in the details may win a battle and lose the war.

And those who deliberately manage the details may not have wanted victory in the first place. Perhaps they wanted the story to change before they were asked to write its ending.

And the ending—if there is still room for reason—will not be written on the Yemeni coast alone, nor in the Strait of Hormuz alone.

It will be written where three things, still rare, come together:

the ability to endure pain,
the ability to be honest with the people,
and the ability to see the war as it is—not as the morning statement issued by Trump, Netanyahu, or Iran’s Revolutionary Guard would have us see it.

The post Dr. Hossam Badrawi writes for Al-Masry Al-Youm: When Nations Drown in the Details appeared first on Dr. Hossam Badrawi.

After writing my article Let’s Live, I remembered this book and returned to it, after a dear friend reminded me of it.

There is a question that visits most of us as we grow older, perhaps more often than we care to admit:

What if?

What if I had chosen a different field of study?

What if I had married someone else?

What if I had not left that job?

What if I had traveled when I had the chance?

What if I had said “yes” instead of “no,” or “no” when I said “yes”?

Two small words, yet they can open a door to an endless world of possibilities.

As I reread The Midnight Library by British writer Matt Haig, I realized that the entire novel is built, in one way or another, around those two words.

But to me, it is not really a novel about possibilities as much as it is a novel about regret—the strange human feeling that sometimes makes us suffer not because of what actually happened to us, but because of what we imagine might have happened had we chosen another path.

And that, I think, is where the brilliance of the idea lies.

Who Is Matt Haig?

Matt Haig is a contemporary British writer and novelist who has written fiction, essays, and books for children. Yet a significant part of his work has revolved around questions of anxiety, depression, loneliness, and the meaning of staying alive.

Perhaps his best-known book, alongside The Midnight Library, is Reasons to Stay Alive. Its title alone reveals much about the intellectual world that concerns him: Why do we continue living when life itself can sometimes seem meaningless?

For that reason, The Midnight Library, published in 2020, does not strike me as merely an ingenious fictional idea. Rather, it feels like an extension of a question that has pursued its author:

What makes life worth living?

The Story

The protagonist of the novel is Nora Seed, a woman who reaches a moment in her life when she feels that everything has failed.

Dreams have not been fulfilled. Relationships have ended. Opportunities have been lost. There are people she believes she has disappointed.

When she looks back, she does not see her life as we normally might—as a mixture of successes and failures—but as a long sequence of mistakes.

She reaches a point where she loses the desire to continue.

But in the mysterious space between life and death, she finds herself in an infinite library.

The Midnight Library.

Its shelves contain an infinite number of books, but these books do not tell the stories of other people.

They tell the stories of her lives.

Each book represents a life she could have lived had she made a different decision at some point.

If she had continued swimming.

If she had chosen another career.

If she had stayed with someone she left.

If she had moved to another country.

If she had pursued a dream she abandoned.

Nora is given something no human being is given in reality: the opportunity to enter these lives and discover what would have happened if she had chosen another path.

And that is where the real novel begins.

It is not so much a journey through parallel universes as it is a journey into the human psyche.

We Know Only the Road We Took

While reading, I stopped at an idea that I find deeper than the events of the novel themselves.

We judge the road we actually took with almost complete knowledge.

We know its failures, disappointments, pain, and costs.

But when we imagine the road we did not take, we usually imagine it through its most beautiful possibilities.

And this is where we can be profoundly unfair to ourselves.

We compare a complete reality with an incomplete fantasy.

We say:

If I had married that person, I would have been happier.

If I had accepted that job, I would have been more successful.

If I had traveled, I would have been wealthier.

But we do not know the other spouse in everyday life, the illness that might have come, the loneliness that might have accompanied success, or the loss hidden behind wealth.

We see the gains of the alternative life, but not its costs.

And this is why regret, although sometimes necessary for learning, can become a cruel mental deception:

We put our real life on trial against an imaginary life that was never tested.

The Tragedy—and the Privilege—of Being Human

Here I arrived at an idea that I believe lies at the heart of the novel for me:

The tragedy of being human is not that we live only one life, but that we can imagine thousands of lives we never lived.

An animal lives its life.

A human being lives a life while simultaneously imagining the lives he or she could have lived.

This is one of the sources of our brilliance, but also one of the sources of our suffering.

The imagination that creates art, science, and civilization is the same imagination capable of creating regret.

The consciousness that allows us to envision the future also allows us to reconstruct the past into something more beautiful than it ever could have been.

Kierkegaard and the Vertigo of Possibility

This led me to the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard, who made anxiety a fundamental part of understanding human freedom.

For Kierkegaard, anxiety does not arise merely from fear of what will happen. It also arises from realizing that we could have chosen something else.

The more possibilities we have, the greater our freedom—but with it comes greater anxiety.

It is as if we stand before countless open doors, without knowing which one leads to the life we want.

The Midnight Library turns this philosophical idea into a physical place.

Endless shelves.

Endless books.

Endless lives.

At first, it seems like a wonderful dream.

But then the question becomes:

Is absolute freedom really a blessing?

Or does part of life’s value come precisely from the fact that we cannot live every possibility?

Sartre and the Burden of Choice

Then Jean-Paul Sartre places an even greater responsibility upon us.

In existentialist philosophy, a human being is not merely what has happened to them, but also what they choose to do with what has happened.

Freedom is not always a comfortable gift.

It is a burden.

Because choice means responsibility.

And whenever we say that circumstances alone created our lives, we may sometimes be trying to escape a more difficult truth: that, to varying degrees, we participated in creating them.

But I disagree with an extreme interpretation of this idea.

Human beings are not absolutely free.

We did not choose our birth, our families, our genes, our country, or our time. Economic, social, and political circumstances can impose very real limits upon us.

Yet within those limits, there remains a space for choice.

And perhaps human dignity exists precisely within that space.

Nietzsche and the Hardest Question

Nietzsche takes us to an even more demanding—and, at the same time, beautiful—test: the idea of eternal recurrence.

Imagine that someone tells you that you will live your exact life again, in every detail, with all its joys, mistakes, and suffering—and then live it again forever.

How would you respond?

Would you consider it a curse?

Or could you say yes to this life exactly as it was?

I do not read Nietzsche’s idea here as a physical theory about time, but as a philosophical test of our ability to affirm life.

And suddenly the question becomes entirely different from Nora’s question at the beginning of the novel.

Instead of:

Which other life should I have lived?

The question becomes:

Can I accept the life I have lived—and then continue creating what remains of it?

To me, that is the more mature question.

Is There Such a Thing as a Perfect Life?

With every life Nora experiences, we discover something simple and profound at the same time:

There is no path without loss.

The life in which you achieve success may be the life in which you lose something else.

The life in which you find love may contain a pain you never expected.

A choice that looks perfect from the outside may create an entire chain of consequences no one could have anticipated.

And here I believe the novel comes close to an important human truth:

Perhaps there is no perfect life.

Not because life is bad, but because life is complex.

Every choice is, at the same time, a surrender of another choice.

Every great “yes” in our lives contains within it a number of “no’s.”

And if we could live every possible life, we might lose the very meaning of choosing.

It is the limitation of life that gives it value.

The Limits of Life Are What Give It Meaning

Here I would take the novel one step further.

We usually regard the limitations of life as a tragedy.

We have one lifetime.

One body.

Limited time.

And we cannot go back.

But what if this very limitation is what gives life its value?

If we had an infinite number of lives ahead of us, we could postpone everything.

I will love you in the next life.

I will apologize in another life.

I will write the book later.

I will travel in another version of myself.

I will start the project in a parallel universe.

But because we have only one life, the present moment becomes valuable.

The words “I love you” matter because they may not be repeated.

An apology becomes necessary because time does not turn back.

A decision matters because we pay a price for it.

Mortality does not merely take meaning away from life; perhaps it is what gives life much of its meaning.

Acceptance Is Not Surrender

The book can easily be interpreted as an invitation to accept the life we have.

But I do not like that interpretation if acceptance means surrender.

I do not want a person to say: This is my life, and that is the end of it.

Coming to terms with the past is one thing. Giving up on shaping the future is another.

I can reconcile myself with my past choices while deciding to change my life tomorrow.

I can accept my mistakes without repeating them.

I can appreciate what I have achieved without losing the desire to achieve more.

So I believe the deeper message is not:

Be satisfied with what you have.

It is:

Do not allow what you failed to do yesterday to prevent you from doing what you still can do tomorrow.

And As We Grow Older…

Perhaps this is what touched me most personally in the novel.

When we are young, we ask:

Which life will I choose?

As we grow older, the question may become:

Did I choose the right life?

I believe both questions are incomplete.

No one knows at the beginning of the journey where it will end, and no one can return at the end to test the other roads.

Perhaps the wiser question is:

What will I do with the life that is still ahead of me?

A person is not merely their résumé.

Not the jobs they held, the positions they reached, the successes they achieved, or even the mistakes they made.

The self is not a museum of the past.

The self is an ongoing project for as long as life continues.

And this is where The Midnight Library connected, for me, with an idea that has occupied my thoughts a great deal lately:

To live is to strive.

To feel.

To love.

To learn.

To discover.

To change your mind.

To begin a new project.

To risk failing again if failure is the price of trying.

And to wake up in the morning with something in your mind that you have not finished yet.

The real danger is not that you chose the wrong path twenty or forty years ago.

The danger is convincing yourself today that there are no paths left.

The Library Within Each of Us

The Midnight Library in the novel is a fictional place between life and death.

But I believe each of us has our own Midnight Library.

It is called memory.

On its shelves are people we loved.

Opportunities we lost.

Doors we closed.

Words we said and wish we had never said.

Words we never said and wish we had.

Dreams that came true and others that remained on the shelf.

We can spend the rest of our lives wandering through this library, pulling out one book after another and asking:

What if?

But life is not inside the library.

Life is outside it.

Wisdom is not about erasing regret. Regret is part of consciousness, and it can be a great teacher.

But wisdom means not allowing regret to become a prison.

We should visit the past to learn from it, not to live there.

And I Closed the Book…

When I closed The Midnight Library, I felt that the novel had begun with death in order to speak about life.

It began with despair in order to arrive at possibility.

It began with the question:

Which life should I have lived?

But it left me facing another question, one I consider more important:

What will I do with the life that is still ahead of me?

Perhaps we did not choose everything that happened to us.

Perhaps we made mistakes in some of the things we chose.

Perhaps, if we could go back in time, we would choose differently.

But time does not go backward.

And perhaps the beauty of life is not in living every possibility, but in giving the possibility that became our life as much meaning as we possibly can.

We do not possess a magical library that allows us to experience the lives we never lived.

But as long as there is another morning, curiosity that has not gone out, a person we can still love, an idea we can still write down, work we have not yet completed, and a dream—small or great—that we have not yet abandoned…

there is still an open book.

And there is still a page that has not been written.

And as long as we can write the next page, the question is not:

Why didn’t I live another life?

It is:

How can I live this life… all the way to the final page?

The post Dr. Hossam Badrawi Writes for “Haarf”: The Midnight Library: Would We Have Been Happier If We Had Lived Another Life? appeared first on Dr. Hossam Badrawi.

In times of crisis, people can become overwhelmed by details, and then by the details of those details. Attention becomes fixed on marginal victories here and there: a village recaptured, a tanker that made it through, a pipeline that stopped for a day and then resumed. In the process, the broader picture disappears.

Worse still, dealing with the details can sometimes serve the objectives of entirely new battles that deliberately alter the overall picture. Not every front is a continuation of the original war. Some are opened precisely so that the original war is no longer visible. Others are opened to strip a state of its centrality without ever formally declaring war against it.

This is the condition of the world today, and it is particularly true of Egypt.

The war between the United States and Iran began with the objective of toppling its regime, within a clear Israeli agenda: breaking Iran’s ability, and that of its proxies, to pose a threat. Then the question shifted to the Strait of Hormuz, the Yemeni coast, the Saudi oil pipeline, and even gasoline prices in an American state that will hold elections in a few months.

Each shift appears logical in its immediate context. Yet taken together, these shifts move the conflict away from decisive resolution and toward managed attrition. They also move the Suez Canal—without any formal announcement—from the position of an indispensable artery to that of a passage whose fate is increasingly determined at its southern gateway rather than by the two shores that surround it.

The Suez Canal is not merely a source of transit fees. It is one of the pillars of Egypt’s sovereign revenues and a strategic asset that makes Egypt’s position on the global trade map greater than its economic output alone would suggest. Its centrality was never merely a matter of geography or stone and water. It depended on the assumption that the southern gateway—the Bab el-Mandeb and the Red Sea—was sufficiently secure for ships to sail northward toward the Mediterranean.

If the gateway to the Red Sea becomes a zone of fire, that assumption begins to erode.

A ship that fears passing through Bab el-Mandeb does not debate the fees charged by the Suez Canal Authority. It looks for the Cape of Good Hope, or for another route that does not pass through Egypt.

This is the modern form of losing centrality: no occupation of the Canal, no official closure of its two banks, but a gradual draining of its value from the south.

Whoever holds the key to Bab el-Mandeb can turn the Canal from an artery into an optional chokepoint.

Alongside the maritime threat comes the threat to water from the south. The Nile is not a technical issue to be postponed. It is a condition of Egypt’s existence as a society and state.

Anyone who becomes absorbed in counting tankers passing through Hormuz risks forgetting that the downstream state is facing a re-engineering of its river from the Ethiopian highlands, in a region where weapons, climate, and foreign financing increasingly intersect.

Between the sea and the Nile stands Sudan: not the periphery, but the connecting link.

Sudan’s instability cannot be understood merely as a crisis involving a neighboring country. It represents a breach in the strategic depth connecting the security of Bab el-Mandeb to the security of the Nile’s sources.

If Sudan fragments, Egypt’s ability to manage its southern frontier as a single strategic space also fragments: the coast, the river corridor, the border, and the demographic hinterland.

A vacuum does not remain empty. It is filled by a militia, a distant power, or a bargaining process over water and ports at the same time.

Egypt’s interests operate on three levels.

Preventive: Egypt must avoid becoming a corridor for the costs of a war it did not create. Every diversion in maritime traffic comes at a cost to the Canal and to confidence in its reliability.

Geopolitical: The Red Sea is a national-security space before it is a theater for proxies. Presence in the south—with Sudan and the Horn of Africa—is a defense of the Canal’s gateway before that gateway is closed through faits accomplis.

Civilizational: Egypt’s role cannot be reduced to repeatedly invoking its centrality after transit revenues have already declined. It requires a policy that connects the security of the maritime gateway with the security of the Nile and with the survival of Sudan as a state rather than its transformation into a corridor for disorder.

The battle over the narrative operates here much as it does in the conflict between Washington and Tehran.

If the framework is limited to “Hormuz,” Egypt appears outside the picture.

If the framework expands to “the security of maritime routes, energy, and water,” Egypt returns to the center of the equation: a state whose surrounding region determines whether the Red Sea remains an international corridor or becomes a trap, and whether the Nile remains a shared river or becomes a weapon wielded by an upstream state.

The Houthis are not a footnote. They are an instrument for transforming the maritime framework.

Trump, who negotiated with the Taliban after concluding that a decisive military victory was impossible, now faces a front that may prove impossible to close.

Managing the bleeding at Bab el-Mandeb means that the Canal pays every day while the major powers negotiate at a table where Cairo may not have a seat.

These are the questions that matter—not the details.

Who will hold the key to Bab el-Mandeb a year from now? And will the Canal retain its meaning if that key remains in someone else’s hands?

How much trade will continue to move through Suez if the southern gateway becomes a security zone rather than a passage?

And will Egypt accept a situation in which its river is managed from the highlands while its sea is managed from the Yemeni shore, as Sudan deteriorates between the two?

Egypt’s role is not to announce alignment in a war it did not choose.

Its role is to prevent Cairo from being turned into a silent casualty of details managed in other capitals.

It must remind the world that anyone seeking stable energy supplies in winter and stable trade in summer cannot leave the gateway to the Red Sea in the hands of a militia, the sources of the Nile to an open-ended bargaining process, or Sudan as a vacuum capable of swallowing both.

The international system is not becoming simply more multipolar; it is fragmenting.

Fragmentation produces a proliferation of smaller fronts that exhaust the center and quietly strip states of their centrality: the centrality of Suez through Bab el-Mandeb, water security through the highlands, and strategic depth through Khartoum.

A comprehensive vision is therefore a condition of survival.

Those who become lost in the details may win a battle and lose the war.

The conclusion will be written at the gateway to the Red Sea, at the sources of the Nile, and in a Sudan that must either remain a bridge or become a breach.

Will Egypt remain a state capable of shaping decisions in its southern neighborhood, or will it simply receive the consequences of decisions made south of its Canal and south of its river—while it was busy following details that did not seem to concern it, until suddenly they concerned it all at once?

The post Hossam Badrawi writes for Al-Hurriya: The Details of the Gulf War and Egypt’s Particular Position appeared first on Dr. Hossam Badrawi.

“The world is changing its features at an accelerating pace, and the rules of the game are being reshaped. The concept of power is no longer what we once knew it to be. We are entering a new era, which we can explore through Dr. Hossam Badrawi’s latest book, A World Unraveling.

But should we simply leave this world fragmented without offering ideas and visions? Does Dr. Badrawi have something to offer that might help us navigate and contain the situation?

Yes—and this is what he promises us in his second book, Towards an Integrated Educational Philosophy for Human Development.”

The two books are available in both Arabic and English.

We look forward to welcoming you!

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The post Invitation to the Book Signing Ceremony of Dr. Hossam Badrawi’s Two New Books appeared first on Dr. Hossam Badrawi.

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And as a form of humor that doctors sometimes resort to in order to cope with the harshness and ironies of the profession, we came up with a playful term:

Recommendoma.

It is neither a recognized medical diagnosis nor a disease affecting any organ of the body. Rather, it is a psychological and professional condition that may affect a medical team when the patient is a relative, a friend, or someone who has been personally recommended.

In such circumstances, excessive attention may turn into confusion, and excessive caution into unnecessary interventions. The desire to eliminate every possible complication may lead to decisions that create complications that might never have occurred had the patient been treated with the same calmness and discipline applied to any other patient.

It is not only a lack of attention that can harm a patient. Sometimes, an excess of attention can be harmful too, when it loses its balance.

I remembered this term during the health crisis my wife went through only a few hours ago. She slipped in the bathroom, fell, and suffered a fracture of the neck of her femur—a fracture that requires rapid diagnosis and decision-making, particularly given her delicate medical circumstances, her cardiac history, and the blood-thinning medication she takes.

The first person who came to my mind, and to the minds of my daughter and sister at the moment of the accident, was Dr. Ali El-Mofty. We do not consider him merely a doctor or a friend. He has been a member of our family for years. Ever since our days at Nile Badrawi Hospital, we have turned to him and sought his advice.

He needed only a few moments.

He left his clinic and his patients and came to us while Mounira was still lying on the bathroom floor after her fall.

He examined her, immediately understood the seriousness of the situation, and decided that she needed to be taken by ambulance to the hospital for the necessary imaging.

The CT scan confirmed his diagnosis: a fracture of the neck of the femur.

From that moment, Dr. Ali calmly and clearly laid out the map of possibilities before us: the nature of the fracture, the available options, the risks of waiting, and what needed to be done within the first twenty-four hours.

He did not hide the difficulty of the decision from us, but neither did he allow fear to replace reason.

We had to balance competing risks. Urgent surgery was necessary, but operating on a cardiac patient taking blood thinners carried risks that could not be ignored. We also had to determine the type and timing of the surgery and the team that would perform it, among alternatives, none of which was entirely free of painful possibilities.

I contacted my son and my friend, Dr. Tamer Oweis, the renowned cardiac surgeon who supervised Mounira’s valve replacement procedure in Germany ten years ago. He did not perform the operation himself, but without him we would never have been able to complete that journey.

His specialty is minimally invasive valve procedures, without opening the chest. Mounira’s operation involved the mitral valve. While I was in Germany, I witnessed firsthand the greatness of Egypt and its young people—their success, capabilities, and professional excellence.

I have written before about Dr. Tamer’s skills and achievements, and I stood by him afterward because my affection for him and his family created an exceptional relationship between us, and because I am proud of him.

He said to me:

“I will get on a plane, leave all my commitments behind, and come to Cairo to be with you.”

He also introduced me to someone he trusts and works with, anesthesiologist Dr. Tarek Marei. Dr. Tarek contacted me immediately after Dr. Tamer spoke with him and explained Mounira’s cardiac condition, her medications, and the sensitivity of her case.

Dr. Tarek Marei.

Dr. Tarek was another young Egyptian physician whom this crisis introduced me to, along with his team. And once again, a moment of crisis allowed me to see more clearly the beauty of Egypt through the excellence and competence of its young doctors.

Anesthesia in this case was critical in preventing surgical risks and protecting the patient.

And here, ten years later, in a moment of pain, fear, and anxiety, the specter of Recommendoma appeared before me.

Dr. Ali El-Mofty.

I know, with absolute certainty, Dr. Ali’s competence and experience as an orthopedic surgeon, and I have complete confidence in his ability to perform the surgery on my wife.

But our closeness to him, our love for him, and his affection for both Mounira and me allowed anxiety to creep into my mind.

We doctors know that treating those close to us is not a simple matter. When a patient becomes part of a physician’s emotional world, feelings and personal attachment can enter the space where professional decisions are made. A doctor may hesitate to perform a necessary procedure, overdo a precautionary measure, or lose the delicate psychological distance that allows him to see the case as it truly is—not as he fears it might become.

Complete neutrality may be an illusion, but maintaining enough psychological distance is essential for sound judgment.

I asked myself: Would it be better and wiser at this moment to choose another highly qualified surgeon, someone with no personal connection to us, so that the operation could take place in a calm professional environment, away from the emotional weight of closeness and the fear of complications?

Yet this decision itself carried profound human awkwardness.

How could I tell a friend whom I trust completely, a man who had left his clinic and come to us in our moment of crisis, that it might be preferable for another doctor to perform the surgery?

How could I explain that this had nothing to do with any doubt about his ability, but perhaps with an excess of confidence in his affection for us?

My fear was not of him.

It was for him—for the psychological burden that might accompany treating my wife.

It was an extraordinarily delicate moment, in which medicine and friendship, trust and fear, gratitude and embarrassment all became intertwined.

But Dr. Ali El-Mofty saved me from all of that.

Through his wisdom, experience, and understanding of what was going through my mind, he welcomed the idea of choosing another surgeon and, in fact, helped guide us toward that choice. He did not regard it as an insult to his standing. He did not turn it into a professional competition. He did not make himself part of the decision.

He placed Mounira and her safety at the center of the picture, then stepped back so that the person he believed was most appropriate for that moment could step forward.

I thought about his attitude for a long time and asked myself:

What kind of greatness is this? What kind of self-confidence?

We have been taught that self-confidence means stepping forward, demonstrating one’s ability, and saying, “I can do it.”

Sometimes, it even means saying, “I am the only one who can do it.”

But what I witnessed was a higher form of confidence: to know one’s own abilities and still be able to say, “Someone else may be better suited for this moment.”

Fragile confidence constantly needs to prove itself.

Deep-rooted confidence is not afraid to make room for others.

A great physician is not only someone who knows how to perform surgery, but someone who also knows who should perform it.

He is not merely someone who knows when to intervene, but someone who possesses the wisdom to know when to step aside and allow another colleague to take the role.

In medicine, as in life, we may imagine that heroism means doing everything ourselves.

But true heroism can sometimes mean knowing when not to act—knowing how to choose, and giving priority to the outcome rather than the role; to the patient rather than the physician; to duty rather than the self.

This is the difference between practicing medicine as a skill and practicing it as an ethical calling.

A professional physician does not ask: Who will receive the credit?

He asks: What will provide the greatest possible safety for the patient?

He does not regard referring a patient to a colleague as a diminishment of his own standing. Rather, he may see it as an expression of the highest degree of responsibility.

He understands that a patient is not an arena for proving superiority, that a medical decision is not a personal competition, and that recognizing the competence of others does not diminish his own competence. It reveals his maturity.

Dr. Ali was present from the very beginning.

He came to our home, diagnosed the condition, insisted on immediate transportation to the hospital, explained the alternatives, helped us make the decision, and then participated in choosing the surgeon.

He did not abandon us when he chose not to perform the operation himself.

He played an even greater role:

He protected the patient.

He protected the decision.

And he protected us from confusion and embarrassment.

The value is not always in the hand holding the scalpel.

Sometimes it lies in the mind that chooses, the heart that reassures, and the conscience that places the patient’s interests above every other consideration.

This experience taught me that Recommendoma is not overcome by reducing attention, but by disciplining it.

It is not treated by distancing ourselves from the patient we love, but by preventing our love from clouding medical judgment.

True care does not necessarily mean more tests and more procedures. It means greater precision, greater objectivity, and the ability to make the right decision at the right time.

It also taught me that one of the most beautiful things about friendship is not that a friend insists on playing a particular role, but that he can let go of that role when he realizes that your best interests require it.

And the greatest quality in a physician is not the confidence that he is capable of doing everything, but the confidence to such a degree that he can choose someone else without feeling threatened, celebrate that person’s success, and remain present—not necessarily at the forefront, but behind the scenes, protecting the patient and safeguarding the decision.

Thank you, Dr. Ali El-Mofty.

Not only because you were there in a moment of danger, and not only because you helped us with your knowledge and experience, but because you gave us a rare lesson in friendship, professionalism, and self-confidence.

There are people who grow in our eyes because of what they do.

And there are those who grow even more because they are capable of doing something themselves, yet choose, at the right moment, to entrust it to someone else.

That, in my view, is not merely the mark of a competent physician.

It is the greatness of a human being.

I cannot end this article without mentioning Rafida Hospital in Zayed, led by Dr. Omayma Idris, my colleague, former student, and friend, together with her sister, Dr. Amira.

The hospital has expanded and become enriched with institutional expertise, strengthened by the choice of highly competent nursing professionals and equipped with state-of-the-art medical technology.

Its ophthalmology department is outstanding. The addition of an orthopedic surgery department, along with the expansion of its CT imaging services and emergency unit, has developed with remarkable efficiency.

I am proud of the Idris family, of what they have accomplished, and of the way they manage a great medical institution in Egypt.

As for my son and student, Dr. Omar Abdel Aziz, founder and director of Al Nada Hospital, he was outside the country at the time. Yet he moved me deeply by contacting me every few hours and introducing me to the surgeon who performed the operation, Dr. Mohamed Rabie, who impressed me with his professionalism, speed, and surgical skill.

Dr. Omar Abdel Aziz runs a hospital that many consider a competitor to Rafida Hospital.

Yet here was one competitor joining forces with another competitor, sending one of his finest surgeons to us, rising above the moment, illuminating the path with knowledge and wisdom, and surrounding the decisions with compassion and friendship.

I say all this to say that God has woven around us a fabric of colleagues from a profession to which I am deeply proud to belong.

I want to shine a light on the beauty of Egypt and its young people with pride and gratitude.

I share this experience so that everyone can see that our society is doing well—that it is rich with accumulated knowledge, experience, and achievement, and, most importantly, with the ethics of our professions.

I want others to share with me a positive view of the reality of my great country, through its people, its doctors, and its institutions.

I have always held on to hope.

The post Wisdom, Ethics, and Skill in One of Humanity’s Greatest Professions By Hossam Badrawi appeared first on Dr. Hossam Badrawi.

What Does Freedom Mean When We Speak of a Child?

When we speak of a child’s freedom, we do not mean releasing them without boundaries into an unknown space, nor do we mean subjecting them entirely to the will of those older than them.

We mean something more precise—and more difficult: that the child has a genuine presence in their own life; that their voice is heard, their questions are respected, and that they grow up understanding why they are asked to do something, not merely how to do it.

The freedom a child needs is not the freedom of an adult whose intellectual and emotional tools are fully developed. It is a freedom appropriate to each stage of development: freedom to explore in the early years, freedom to express opinions during the school years, and gradually increasing freedom to make decisions during adolescence.

Every stage deserves its own space, and every space deserves its own boundaries.

The right boundaries do not restrict a child. They give the child solid ground from which to leap.

There is a common confusion in our culture between two fundamentally different concepts: obedience and commitment.

Obedience is behavior driven by fear or submission to an external authority. Commitment, by contrast, is behavior rooted in understanding and inner conviction.

Commitment remains with a person even when no one is watching. Blind obedience, however, disappears when the authority figure is gone.

A child may comply out of fear of punishment, rather than because they believe in the value behind the rule. And as they grow older and parental authority begins to recede, they may lose their moral compass.

Conscious parenting does not seek to produce an obedient child, but an aware child.

The difference is enormous.

When an aware child follows a rule, it is because they have accepted it—or at least understood why it is necessary. That understanding is what gradually becomes character.

Curiosity: The Blessing We Fear

Nothing unsettles parents quite like a child who asks difficult questions.

“Why do we pray?”

“Does God really exist?”

“Why is our religion the right one?”

Such questions are often met with irritation or intimidation, when in fact they are, at their core, signs of intellectual and social health.

A child who asks questions is a child who thinks.

And such a child is more capable of developing genuine faith than one who is simply given answers to questions they never asked.

Curiosity is not a threat to values.

It is the safest path toward them.

Many people believe that encouraging curiosity threatens the values they have instilled in their children. The truth may be the opposite.

Values that cannot withstand a seven-year-old’s question deserve to be reconsidered.

Authentic values, on the other hand, become stronger through curiosity, because when a child is allowed to search, they may discover—if given a healthy environment—what makes those values meaningful and coherent to them.

Do Parents Have the Right to Impose Their Religion on Their Children?

This question forces many people to confront themselves.

An honest answer requires distinguishing between two overlapping levels.

The first is upbringing.

There is no way to raise a child outside some cultural or spiritual context. No one is born into a cultural vacuum.

A family that does not pass on its religion will inevitably pass on something else—materialism, atheism, indifference, or another worldview.

Every form of upbringing is, at its core, the transmission of a particular understanding of the world.

From this perspective, introducing children to their family’s religion is not necessarily an act of “imposition.” It is a natural and unavoidable part of human upbringing.

The second is the method.

The real difference is not in what we pass on, but in how we pass it on.

A religion presented through intimidation and punishment produces superficial compliance.

A religion presented through meaning, beauty, and dialogue can produce genuine belonging.

Faith that has never been tested by a question is a faith that has not yet fully matured.

A Lesson from History: The Gradual Revelation as a Model for Education

There is a profound educational insight embedded in the history of religions—one that we rarely invoke when thinking about how to raise our children.

The Islamic message, for example, was not revealed all at once as a complete system of rituals and laws. Rather, it unfolded through two distinct stages: first Mecca, then Medina.

In Mecca, over thirteen years, the message sought to build the human being from within: monotheism, human dignity, compassion, accountability, and the meaning of existence.

There were not yet detailed obligatory rituals or an elaborate body of regulations. The first and primary goal was to prepare the heart and establish spiritual awareness.

Then, once those roots had taken hold, Medina brought obligations, rituals, and social organization—finding fertile ground upon which to build.

The revelation itself did not begin with ritual.

It began with meaning.

So Why Do We Begin Where It Ended?

This sequence was not merely a pragmatic consideration. It reflected a profound understanding of human nature:

A person does not readily embrace an external commitment unless they have first believed in the inner motivation behind it.

Prayer, for someone who understands its meaning and longs for it, is not a burden. It can be a spiritual journey.

But prayer imposed upon someone before they understand why they are praying can often produce a quiet rebellion that emerges later in life.

The first stage: spiritual roots

The great values: compassion, honesty, gratitude, and dignity.

No intimidation. No material incentives.

Instead, a living example that the child sees in the people around them and experiences in their everyday environment.

The second stage: cultural belonging

Love of heritage, celebration, stories, and identity.

A child belongs before fully understanding, just as a person can love their homeland before reading its history.

Emotional belonging can provide the environment in which intellectual conviction later develops.

The third stage: ritual by choice

When a child matures, begins asking “Why?”, and receives an answer that genuinely convinces them, the ritual becomes a conscious act rather than a mechanical habit.

Such commitment is far deeper and more enduring than one built on coercion or fear.

The beauty of this approach is that it does not abandon religion.

It takes religion more seriously.

It recognizes that religion is too profound to be reduced to a child performing a ritual without understanding its spirit.

Gradual development is not a form of leniency toward religion. It is an acknowledgment that when God chose to teach human beings, the process began with the heart—not with a checklist.

Why Not Let Them Choose When They Grow Up?

This question sounds logical at first, but it contains an implicit assumption: that a child can be left completely unshaped until adulthood and then make a choice with a neutral mind.

That is impossible.

The human mind does not begin from zero.

Every child is inevitably shaped by what they see, what they hear, and what they experience around them.

The real question is not:

Do we shape them?

It is:

Do we shape them consciously or through neglect?

Neglect itself is a form of shaping, and it can sometimes be even more influential.

Yet there is a genuine and legitimate right that must be recognized: the right of an adult to reconsider what they were taught and reshape their convictions.

Parents who are confident in their values should not fear such reconsideration.

They should encourage it at the appropriate time, because they understand that what is built on solid foundations will not collapse at the first question.

How Do We Bring Together Wings and Roots?

The most beautiful image of education is that of a tree:

Deep roots and branches reaching in every direction.

The roots are the fundamental values—dignity, compassion, honesty, and spiritual belonging.

The branches are curiosity, questioning, exploration, and difference.

Roots do not prevent branches from reaching outward.

They make that reaching safer.

A child who knows where they came from can dare to travel far because they know how to return.

In practical terms, this means answering a child’s questions honestly, even when those questions make us uncomfortable.

It means sometimes admitting that we do not have all the answers.

It means presenting values as lived practices rather than memorized lists.

And above all, it means becoming ourselves the examples of what we ask of our children—not merely transmitters of what we inherited without ever reconsidering it.

There is no contradiction between instilling values and nurturing curiosity.

The contradiction arises only when we confuse the value itself with the way we present it.

A child who is given room to question, within an environment that respects them and surrounds them with clear love and understandable reasoning, is best equipped to carry genuine values forward—and eventually pass them on to those who come after.

The goal is not to raise a child who repeats what we say.

It is to raise a human being who believes in what they say.

On Children

In The Prophet, Kahlil Gibran wrote:

“Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you, yet they belong not to you.”

He continues:

“You may give them your love but not your thoughts,
For they have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies but not their souls,
For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow,
which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.”

And he reminds parents:

“You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you.
For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.”

You are the bows from which your children are sent forth as living arrows.

The archer sees the target upon the path of infinity, and bends you with his power so that your arrows may fly swiftly and far.

Let your bending in the archer’s hand be with joy and acceptance—for just as the archer loves the arrow that flies, so too does he love the bow that remains steady.

The post Dr. Hossam Badrawi writes for Veto Gate: “A Child’s Freedom Between Roots and Wings” appeared first on Dr. Hossam Badrawi.

Whenever I read a great novel, I do not ask only: What happened to its characters? I also ask: Why has it remained alive after the world in which it was written has changed?

Some novels survive because they tell an engaging story. Others survive because they document a bygone era. But the rare works endure because they touch something in the human being that does not change with the passage of time.

Among these works is Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea.

On the surface, it is an exceedingly simple story: an old fisherman goes out to sea alone, catches an enormous fish after a long struggle, and then, on his journey home, sharks devour it until he reaches the shore with nothing but its skeleton.

Yet great literature sometimes does what a drop of water can do when it reflects an entire sky. In this short story, we see an entire lifetime: dreaming, striving, loneliness, pain, dignity, triumph, loss—and then the hardest question of all:

Is a person’s worth measured by what he brings back to shore, or by what he becomes while struggling against the sea?

Hemingway… The Writer Who Simplified Language and Expanded Meaning

Ernest Hemingway was born in 1899 and lived a life that sometimes seemed like an extension of his own novels. He witnessed war, worked as a journalist, traveled, fished, sailed, and experienced adventure, danger, love, and loss. These experiences found their way into his writing, but what distinguished him was not simply the abundance of events. It was his way of writing.

He believed that a writer did not need to say everything. He compared his style to an iceberg: the small part visible above the water is only a fraction of the whole, while the greater mass remains hidden beneath the surface.

And so his language became economical and clear, almost free of ornament, while beneath its simple words lay deep layers of fear, pain, and meaning.

The Old Man and the Sea was published in 1952, at a time when some critics felt that Hemingway’s literary brilliance had begun to fade. The novel became something of a major literary comeback. It won the Pulitzer Prize and helped reaffirm his stature before he received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954.

Perhaps the irony is that Hemingway wrote about an old man determined to prove that he was not finished, at a time when Hemingway himself needed to prove that his creative powers were not finished either.

For that reason, I find it difficult to completely separate Santiago, the old fisherman, from Hemingway, the writer. Both ventured into a sea of uncertainty, and both returned with a work declaring that age, or the setbacks of yesterday, do not mean that the capacity to create has died.

The Story

Santiago is an old Cuban fisherman who has gone eighty-four days without catching a single fish. In the village, some regard him as unlucky. Even Manolin, the boy who loves him and learns from him, is forced by his family to work with other fishermen who are more successful.

But the boy does not lose faith in the old man, and the old man does not lose faith in himself.

On the eighty-fifth day, Santiago decides to sail farther out than usual. He does not know what awaits him, but he knows that staying close to shore will change nothing.

There, in the depths of the sea, his line catches an enormous marlin, almost larger than his boat.

He cannot lift it, and it cannot break free from him. It pulls the boat far out to sea, and a long struggle begins—one that lasts for days. The old man’s hands become wounded, his body grows exhausted, and hunger and thirst intensify, but he refuses to let go of the line.

What is striking is that Santiago does not hate the fish. On the contrary, he admires its strength, beauty, and nobility. He speaks to it as though it were a brother or a worthy opponent. He loves it, yet he knows he must kill it.

Here, fishing becomes more than a struggle between man and animal. It becomes a confrontation between two forces bound together by a mysterious relationship of respect and pain.

At last, the old man succeeds in killing the fish. He ties it alongside the boat and begins the journey home.

It appears that he has won, that his days of bad luck are over, and that the village will finally see proof of his ability.

But the fish’s blood attracts sharks.

Santiago fights them with everything he has: first with his harpoon, then with his knife, then with an oar, and finally with whatever strength remains in him. He kills some and drives others away, but they keep coming. They devour the fish piece by piece until, by the time he reaches shore, nothing remains but its head, tail, and backbone.

The old man returns exhausted, carrying his boat’s mast on his shoulder. He climbs to his hut and falls asleep.

In the morning, the villagers see the enormous skeleton and realize the size of the fish he had caught. Manolin sits beside him and cries, then tells him that he will go fishing with him again.

As for Santiago, he sleeps and dreams of the lions he had seen on the beaches of Africa in his youth.

What I Took Away from The Old Man and the Sea

The first question the novel leaves in my mind is: Did Santiago return victorious or defeated?

If we judge by the logic of the marketplace, he lost. The fish that could have brought him money and status returned as a skeleton that could not be sold.

And if we judge by the outcome alone, everything he had endured at sea seems to have been wasted.

But I believe Hemingway wants to free the meaning of victory from the outcome itself.

A person does not always control what happens to the fruits of his labor. But he does control the way he confronts what happens.

He may succeed in catching his dream, only to have the sharks of life tear it apart before his eyes: illness, injustice, betrayal, an unforgiving era, or a twist of fate he cannot prevent.

And yet, there remains something the sharks cannot devour unless a person willingly surrenders it to them: his inner dignity.

That is why the novel’s central idea is that a person may be destroyed, but he cannot be defeated.

The difference between destruction and defeat is profound.

Destruction may come from the outside: a person may lose his money, his health, his status, or someone he loves.

True defeat, however, takes place within, when he becomes convinced that he is no longer worthy of trying, or when he allows loss to redefine who he is.

Santiago lost the fish, but he did not lose himself.

Old Age Is Not an Exit from Life

I also read the novel as a defense of the dignity of old age.

The villagers saw Santiago as a man whose time had passed. Eighty-four days without a catch seemed sufficient evidence that his experience was no longer valuable, that luck had abandoned him, and perhaps that he should accept his place on the margins of life.

But the old man did not go out to sea to deny his age. He went out to affirm that growing older does not erase a person’s capacity to strive.

He knew the limitations of his body and dealt with them consciously, but he did not allow weakness to become his identity.

This is a meaning that comes closer to me the older I become: the greatest danger in old age is not that the body loses strength, but that a person accepts the idea imposed upon him by others that nothing more is expected of him.

We often tell older people, with the best of intentions, “Rest. You have done enough.”

But life is not measured only by what we have accomplished. It is also measured by what still awakens in us the desire to get up in the morning.

Santiago was not alive merely because he was breathing. He was alive because he still had a sea to sail.

And the sea does not have to be water and ships for every person.

It may be a book he wants to write, knowledge he wants to acquire, a grandchild to whom he can pass on his experience, a cause he believes in, music he wants to play, or a love he wants to preserve.

What matters is that he still has a horizon that extends beyond the boundaries of his day.

The Sea Is Not the Enemy

I did not see the sea in the novel as a symbol of an evil world. I saw it as a symbol of life itself: beautiful and harsh, giving and taking, conspiring against no one and guaranteeing nothing to anyone.

Santiago loves the sea, even though he knows its dangers. He speaks of it as one speaks of a close companion. He sees birds and fish as fellow beings, not merely as tools for his survival.

Even the marlin he intends to kill is, in his eyes, a magnificent creature worthy of respect.

In this sense, the novel was ahead of its time in the way it portrayed the relationship between human beings and nature. Man is not the absolute master of the universe, but part of a larger web of life.

He kills in order to live, but he does not do so with arrogance or disregard. He understands that his victory over another creature carries within it an element of sadness and responsibility.

Perhaps Santiago’s tragedy began when he went beyond the boundaries of necessity into the desire to prove himself.

He himself wonders whether he has gone too far.

And here the novel opens an important moral question:

When does ambition become courage, and when does it become transgression?

Do we struggle for what we need, or do we struggle to prove to others that we are still capable?

The novel gives us no final answer.

And that is part of its greatness.

The Boy… The Continuation of Meaning

Manolin is not, in my view, a marginal character. He is an essential part of the old man’s victory.

Experience that is not passed on dies. And a person who finds someone who believes in him is never entirely alone, even when he sails by himself.

The boy saw in Santiago what the village did not.

He did not measure his worth by the number of fish he brought home, but by what he had learned from him.

And when the old man returned without the fish’s flesh, the boy returned to him.

It is as though the novel is telling us that the greatest thing Santiago left behind was not his catch, but the human being he helped shape.

Here, Manolin becomes a symbol of the continuity between generations.

The body grows old and strength declines, but experience, love, and courage can pass from one generation to the next.

Perhaps immortality does not mean that we remain, but that something of us remains alive in another person.

The Sharks of Life

The sharks in the novel are real, but they also work as a symbol of everything that devours the fruits of our efforts after they have finally come to fruition.

Every person has his own sharks.

And sometimes the cruelest ones are not the great catastrophes, but the small, successive losses that eat away at a dream piece by piece, while its owner watches it diminish and cannot save it whole.

Yet Santiago continues to fight even when he knows he will not be able to preserve the entire fish.

That may seem irrational according to the logic of profit and loss, but it makes perfect sense according to the logic of dignity.

He does not fight because he is certain he will win. He fights because he wants to remain faithful to what he believes in until the very end.

This, in my view, is one of the novel’s deepest meanings:

Not every battle we fight is one in which victory is guaranteed. Some battles are worth fighting because not fighting them would make us less respectful of ourselves.

And yet, we should not glorify pain for its own sake.

The old man is not great because he suffered. He is great because he was able to give his suffering meaning.

Suffering alone does not elevate a person. It may crush him.

What elevates him is what he makes of it, and what he discovers about himself through it.

Why Was The Old Man and the Sea Ahead of Its Time?

Because it understood early that modern man would live in a world obsessed with measuring worth by outcomes:

How much did you earn?

How much do you own?

How many people applauded you?

What did you bring back to shore?

Hemingway, however, asks a different question:

How did you make the journey?

In an age when success has become a quick image displayed before others, the novel reminds us that some of our greatest victories are witnessed by no one.

A person may reach the shore carrying nothing but the skeleton of his dream, yet discover at sea his courage and his limits, and prove to himself that he did not abandon himself at the first sign of pain.

The novel was also ahead of its time because it did not present a superhuman hero.

Santiago is poor, old, and alone. He becomes tired, makes mistakes, and talks to himself.

His heroism does not lie in possessing extraordinary strength, but in resisting despair with whatever little strength remains to him.

That is a more human form of heroism than all the myths, because it is accessible, in different degrees, to every one of us.

What Remains in the End

At the end of the novel, the fish is gone. The struggle is over. Even the admiration of the villagers fades.

What remains is the old man asleep, the boy beside him, and an old dream of lions.

The lions are a memory of his youth. But in my view, they are not simply a longing for strength that has been lost.

They are a sign that part of the human spirit remains young, no matter how heavily time weighs upon the body.

A person does not live by biological age alone, but by whatever remains inside him of wonder, desire, and imagination.

Santiago went out to sea to catch a fish, but he returned with a greater truth:

We cannot always prevent life from taking many things away from us. But we can decide whether it will take our self-respect along with them.

The sharks devoured the flesh of the fish, but they could not erase its size.

Its skeleton remained on the shore as testimony that the old man had not imagined his adventure, and that what he had accomplished was real, even if nothing remained of it that could be sold.

This is how I see The Old Man and the Sea:

It is not a novel about catching a fish.

It is about the human being standing alone before something more powerful than himself, knowing that he may lose—and pulling on the line anyway.

We do not always choose the sea.

We do not choose the size of the fish.

Nor do we choose how many sharks will come our way.

But until the very last moment, we can choose how we hold the oar.

And perhaps that is the only victory no one can ever take away from us.

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