By M.Rahman, PhD, Advisor, Dhaka Straits Times

Some mornings now feel heavier than they used to. You wake up, check your phone, and the world already seems one step ahead in chaos — an earthquake here, political tension there, news of violence somewhere else. It’s as if every headline demands a piece of our emotional energy, leaving us a little more drained than the day before.

In Dhaka, the recent earthquake did more than rattle buildings. It rattled our sense of normalcy. For a few seconds, the city paused — cars stopped, families rushed downstairs, office workers huddled in parking lots, strangers exchanged worried glances. Even after the tremor passed, the unease lingered like an invisible aftershock.

And maybe that is where we are now as a society: living in a state of slow, continuous aftershocks.

Prices rise unpredictably. Politics feels uncertain and often divisive. Children are growing up with more screens than green spaces. Traffic has become a daily negotiation between sanity and survival. And on top of all that, the planet itself seems restless beneath our feet.

But amid all this noise, there is something quietly beautiful happening too — people are learning to hold on to each other a little more tightly.

After the quake, I saw neighbours who barely spoke checking on one another. A security guard in Gulshan was guiding people safely out of a building as if they were his own family. A mother in Badda held a stranger’s child until the child’s parents found them in the crowd. In those brief, shaking moments, the social walls we build around ourselves — class, status, income, profession — simply dissolved. Everyone was just human. Everyone was just scared. Everyone just wanted to feel safe.

Perhaps that is the lesson hidden inside these uncertain times: that the world may be unstable, but we don’t have to be alone in it.

We cannot control tectonic plates.
We cannot fix politics overnight.
We cannot predict every crisis that waits around the corner.

But we can practice something that is becoming increasingly rare — kindness, patience, and a willingness to pause. We can choose to make our personal worlds a little softer even when the outer world feels hard.

Maybe the real contemporary challenge is not surviving tremors or tolerating chaos; it is learning how to breathe through uncertainty without losing our humanity. It is remembering to ask someone, “Are you okay?” It is choosing to look up from our screens long enough to notice when someone needs help, or even when we need help ourselves.

As the city continues to grow, shake, struggle, and rebuild, I hope we keep the best part of ourselves intact — that instinctive, human warmth we show when everything else is falling apart.

Because the world will continue to test us. But how we respond — with fear or with compassion — is still entirely up to us.