Oh my friend... welcome back.
Last time, I walked with someone who trusted the world enough to step into it openly---who believed that conversation, presence, and courage could still move humanity forward.
Today, I want to tell you about someone who faced a very different world.
A world where doors were closing instead of opening.
Where trust no longer offered protection.
Where the future narrowed, day by day, until almost nothing seemed possible at all.
And yet---inside that tightening world---I watched something extraordinary happen.
Not resistance with weapons.
Not escape.
Not denial.
But a quiet, determined decision to remain human anyway.
I remember her sitting at a small desk in Nazi-occupied Amsterdam, a notebook open in front of her. Outside, the city was being quietly transformed---posters nailed up overnight, rules announced and then tightened, uniforms turning familiar streets into places of unease. Lists were being made. Doors were being marked. Jewish lives were being narrowed, step by deliberate step.
Inside, there was a pen moving across paper.
Her name was Etty Hillesum. She was a young Jewish woman living under occupation, fully aware of what that now meant. She knew the danger was real. She knew the future promised nothing kind. And still, what she chose to write down astonished me.
I expected fear. I expected rage. I expected the hard shell people grow when the world turns openly hostile.
Instead, I found attention.
She wrote about small things---the feel of the air, the movement of her own thoughts, the way bitterness crept in unnoticed if she didn't tend to it carefully. She wrote as if her inner life mattered, even now. As if it were something worth protecting in a world determined to strip her of everything else.
Outside, the space available to her was shrinking. New restrictions arrived constantly---where she could go, what she could do, who she was allowed to be. And yet, inside those pages, her inner world was expanding---becoming more deliberate, more awake, more fiercely alive.
She did not deny what was happening. She saw it clearly. But she made one decision, again and again: that the violence pressing in around her would not be allowed to take possession of her interior life.
As danger closed in and the future darkened, she kept writing---not to escape reality, but to meet it fully.
And I found myself asking a question I had never asked before:
What does it mean to remain human... when the world has decided you no longer count as one?
Only later did I begin to understand how quickly her world closed in---and how fully she understood what was happening as it did.
She was born in 1914, in the Netherlands, into a Jewish family that valued learning and independence. By the time she reached her twenties, she was intellectually restless, emotionally searching, and deeply attentive to the inner life. She studied languages and literature. She read widely. She questioned herself relentlessly. Nothing about her suggested passivity or retreat from the world.
Then the occupation came.
At first, the changes were incremental. New regulations. New forms to carry. New exclusions that were framed as temporary, administrative, regrettable. Jewish citizens were separated out---at work, in public spaces, in law---until daily life itself became a negotiation with danger.
What struck me was how clearly she saw this progression. She was not surprised by it. She understood, earlier than many, that the machinery of dehumanization does not arrive all at once. It advances through routine. Through paperwork. Through silence.
As restrictions multiplied, she began keeping a diary---not as a record of events alone, but as a way of staying morally awake. She wrote to discipline her attention. To keep resentment from hardening into hatred. To notice when fear tried to shrink her capacity for care.
For a time, she worked for the Jewish Council, an institution caught in an impossible position---attempting to mediate daily survival under a regime designed to destroy. There, she witnessed bureaucracy under terror: how language can anesthetize cruelty, how systems can absorb responsibility until no one feels accountable anymore.
Eventually, she made a decision that still unsettles me.
Rather than go into hiding, she chose to go to Westerbork, the transit camp from which thousands of Jews were deported east. She did not go because she believed it was safe. She went because she believed she could be of use---offering care, listening, steadiness, presence---to people whose lives were being dismantled in front of her.
This was not resignation. It was intention.
She knew the risk. She knew the likely outcome. And she chose to remain where suffering was most concentrated, not out of martyrdom, but out of responsibility.
As the walls closed in---physically, legally, morally---her choices narrowed. Travel became impossible. Escape became unlikely. Control vanished. What remained was how she would inhabit each moment that was still hers.
History often teaches us to look for resistance in visible acts---escape, sabotage, refusal. What she offers instead is another kind of courage: the refusal to let a violent world dictate the shape of her inner life.
She did not claim this would stop what was coming.
She claimed only that something essential must not be lost before it arrived.
And she was willing to stake her life on that belief.
What unfolded inside her during those years still leaves me quiet.
As the world around her narrowed---laws tightening, freedoms stripped away, futures erased---her inner life did something unexpected. It widened. Not in denial of reality, but in response to it. She refused to let terror become the final authority over her thoughts, her emotions, or her sense of responsibility.
This was not a spirituality of escape.
She did not retreat into fantasy or numb herself against pain. She paid attention---careful, disciplined attention---to what was happening both outside and within. She noticed how easily hatred tried to settle in her chest, and she met it deliberately, refusing to let it take root. Not because she misunderstood evil, but because she understood what it does to the soul that carries it.
I watched her make a choice that few people ever articulate, let alone keep: that the destruction of the world would not be allowed to complete itself inside her.
She spoke of God, but not as a rescuer descending from above. She spoke as if something sacred needed shelter within the human heart. As if responsibility ran both ways---that just as people ask God for protection, God might also require protection from being extinguished by cruelty and despair.
This was not theology shaped for debate. It was a spiritual practice shaped by urgency.
She believed that every act of bitterness added to the violence already overwhelming the world. And every act of attention---every moment of care, restraint, kindness---pushed back, however slightly, against the tide. She did not imagine this would save her. She imagined it might save something else: the possibility that humanity could still be recognized when the violence was over.
What astonished me most was her refusal to dehumanize even those who were destroying her world. She named the evil plainly. She did not excuse it. But she would not allow herself the comfort of hatred. She understood that hatred offers a kind of relief---and that it comes at a terrible cost.
In choosing not to hate, she did not become passive.
She became precise.
Every moment mattered. Every reaction mattered. How one stood in line. How one spoke to another person. How one carried sorrow without letting it harden into contempt. These small, interior acts became moral events, charged with consequence.
At a time when power was defined by domination and survival, she practiced a different kind of strength. One that did not rely on control or victory. One that could exist even when all external guarantees were gone.
She did not claim that goodness would prevail.
She claimed something more demanding: that goodness must be practiced anyway.
In a world intent on reducing people to numbers, categories, and cargo, she insisted---quietly, relentlessly---on remaining fully human.
And in doing so, she showed me that spirituality, at its deepest, is not about escaping suffering.
It is about refusing to let suffering decide who you become.
History usually remembers those who change outcomes. Those who stop something. Those who build something new in the ruins.
Etty Hillesum did none of these.
She did not alter the machinery that destroyed her. She did not escape it. She did not live to rebuild afterward. And yet---what she offers to history may be one of the most demanding contributions of all.
She shows us what responsibility looks like when there is no path to victory.
Most moral frameworks are built around effectiveness. Around making a difference that can be measured. Around preventing harm, correcting injustice, or surviving long enough to tell the story. Etty strips that away. She asks a harder question:
What does goodness owe the world when it cannot win?
Her answer is not resignation. It is precision.
She insists that moral life does not end when outcomes are removed from our control. That the value of an action is not erased simply because it fails to change the final result. That how we meet reality still matters---even when reality is brutal beyond comprehension.
This is a radical reframing.
Etty relocates responsibility from the external to the interior, not as escape, but as last ground. When laws are unjust, systems are lethal, and choices are stripped down to almost nothing, she shows that there remains one domain that cannot be seized without consent: the inner stance toward the world.
And she treats that stance as consequential.
By refusing hatred, she does not absolve evil. She refuses to let it reproduce itself through her. By choosing attention, care, and restraint, she preserves something fragile that history depends on more than it admits: the memory of what it means to be human.
Her contribution is not a program. It is a witness.
She leaves behind a record that says: even here---even now---human beings were capable of moral clarity without illusion, courage without aggression, faith without guarantee.
That record matters because history does not only rebuild with laws and institutions. It rebuilds with images of possibility. With proof that something worth preserving survived the worst conditions imaginable.
When later generations ask how civilization begins again after catastrophe, Etty does not point to strategies or structures. She points to the interior ground that must be kept intact if rebuilding is to mean anything at all.
She reminds us that before there can be libraries, or laws, or houses of wisdom, there must be people who have not allowed their inner life to be destroyed.
That is what she gives to history.
Not hope that suffering can be avoided.
But proof that humanity can endure without surrendering its soul.
I want to speak to you plainly for a moment---because I know how this world can feel.
It is heavy right now. Loud. Fractured. There is pressure everywhere to choose sides, to harden positions, to stay alert and angry, as if vigilance itself were a form of virtue. Many of you carry a quiet exhaustion---the sense that simply paying attention has begun to feel like a moral burden.
Etty Hillesum knew this pressure in its most extreme form.
She lived inside a society that was not merely polarized, but collapsing. Language was breaking down. Trust was gone. Law had turned against humanity itself. And in the middle of that destruction, she came to a conclusion that still challenges me.
She understood that being human was more important than being right.
Not because truth didn't matter---but because a world rebuilt on correctness alone would have nothing left to stand on. She saw that when societies unravel, it is not arguments that disappear first. It is empathy. Restraint. The ability to see another person as fully real.
That is why she guarded her inner life so fiercely.
She understood that the future---whatever shape it might take---would be built by people who had not allowed their humanity to be destroyed in the meantime. That every act of bitterness, every indulgence in hatred, every moment of moral numbness made the work of rebuilding harder for those who came after.
Etty did not imagine that her choices would stop the catastrophe unfolding around her. She was not naïve about outcomes. But she was clear about responsibility. The way she lived inside history mattered, even when history itself had become monstrous.
That insight reaches directly into our own moment.
You may feel pressured to simplify others. To reduce them to positions, tribes, headlines. You may feel justified in hardening yourself, in pulling back from care, in choosing righteousness over relationship. The world will often reward you for that.
Etty Hillesum stands quietly against this temptation.
She reminds us that our shared future will not be built only by policies or victories or correct positions. It will be built---slowly, painfully---on the choices we make each day about how human we allow ourselves to remain.
How we speak when fear would make us cruel.
How we listen when certainty would make us dismissive.
How we refuse to let the damage around us complete itself inside us.
She does not ask us to ignore injustice.
She does not ask us to abandon truth.
She asks something more demanding.
That we remember: when societies break apart, humanity itself becomes the work.
And if we fail to protect it now---no matter how justified we feel---there will be very little left to build with later.
Etty understood that.
And she chose, even in the worst of times, to stand firm in her humanity---so that the future, however distant, would still have a place to begin.
When I sit with Etty's words, I don't hear instructions. I hear a kind of steady companionship---someone standing beside us, not above us, reminding us of what remains in our care.
She never pretended that choosing humanity was easy. She knew it came with cost. She felt the pull toward bitterness just as clearly as anyone else. What sets her apart is not purity, but attentiveness---the way she noticed herself hardening and gently refused to let that be the final word.
That feels very close to home.
You don't have to be living under occupation to recognize this struggle. You feel it when outrage becomes addictive. When certainty crowds out curiosity. When the world's pain tempts you to retreat into slogans or silence. When it starts to feel safer to be right than to be kind.
Etty's life asks a quieter, braver question: Who are you becoming as you respond to the world as it is?
Not in theory.
Not in argument.
But in the small, interior choices no one else can see.
She believed that every moment offered a decision---whether to pass on the damage unchanged, or to interrupt it, even briefly, with care. She understood that history is not shaped only by events, but by the moral texture of the people who endure them.
You may not be able to fix what is broken around you. Etty couldn't either. But you can decide what you carry forward. What tone you add to the world. What kind of human being you insist on remaining, even when it would be easier to let go.
That insistence matters more than we like to admit.
Because when the time comes to rebuild---after conflict, after loss, after disillusionment---it is not systems alone that do the work. It is people who have kept their inner lives intact. People who have not surrendered their capacity for attention, restraint, and compassion.
Etty Hillesum shows us that this work can begin anywhere. Even at a small desk. Even in the darkest of times.
Especially then.
Next time, I want to take you far from that desk---and far back in time.
To a city where humanity faced another kind of rupture, and chose, deliberately, to preserve its memory rather than surrender it to loss. A place where scholars gathered what had been scattered, and treated knowledge itself as something sacred.
We will go to House of Wisdom in Baghdad---a house built not for power, but for remembrance. A reminder that when individuals protect humanity within themselves, civilizations can later protect it between generations.
Until then, my friend---be gentle with your own attention. Guard it. Tend it. The future depends on more of it than we often realize.
Much love.
I am, Harmonia.