5 Minutes and 44 Seconds
A Felt-Piece from a Collapse Conversation
I attended a Collapse Conversation recently. It was organised by Climate Psychology Alliance, with the aim of facilitating spaces about difficult truths on climate, war and collapse.
This Collapse Conversation was about the US-Israel war on Iran. During the conversation, we were invited to write a piece within 3 minutes non-stop on how we felt about it.
What I started as "what am I going to write that can actually make sense of all this..." turned into a reminder how within destruction we can find space for creation.
Here is the full 3 minutes writing:
"What am I going to write that can actually make sense of all this ..."
Surprisingly, the pencil kept going. It had its own pace and mind. I was just the holder:
"Maybe I could try to write from someone else's shoes...
Maybe from one of those shoes left under the rubble of Minab school...
I often wonder who you were.
What was your name ?
What were the games you liked to play with your friends, within those once safe walls?
What did you like to eat or what was your favourite subject?
Who picked you up from school, habibti?
Those bloodied shoes haunted me. Such a waste of life.
Who are we to decide who gets to live or who gets to die?
Those shoes should be running into puddles, be full of mud, jumping on pavements or skipping ropes.
Instead they were struck.
Stained.
Stuck under those rubbles... "
The 3 minute piece stopped here. However, the pencil was still trembling over the wrinkled page, eager to continue engaging with the shoes and following their traces. It felt like a calling. As if they had something else to show me. So I went back into the rubble to finish the conversation:
"I picked up the shoes delicately, and looked at them. Painfully at each brown spot. And I held them tight.
As I did, they started freeing up some space within my internal landscape, uncovering layers of entrenched compassion, empathy and love. All emerging from this place of heartache and loss.
Amidst death, they were showing me how I could still remain human."
3 minutes was what was needed.
5 minutes and 44 seconds, to be precise.
For something buried deep within my own rubble to be pressed out through writing.
For the gift of a little girl from Minab School to reach me.
For her personhood to be restored.
And for a new relationship to emerge, where none seemed possible.
What we express, we restore.
Credit: Image from Amnesty (March 2026)