There are lives we choose, and then there are lives that choose us. Journalism, for me, was never the plan, yet it ensnared me with the subtlest of traps: a few hurried lines I wrote while waiting for an interview. Those four hundred words, dashed off like idle scribbles, became the key that unlocked a door I hadn’t even known existed. To the editor-in-chief, they hinted at a voice; to me, they were simply a way of passing time. But that is how destiny often works — our smallest gestures resonate more loudly than our most prepared intentions.

In those early years, I entered the newsroom like one entering a forge. Each article was hammered, reshaped, and contested until it could withstand the fire of public scrutiny. Proofreaders became philosophers of commas, subeditors lawyers of implication, and the editor-in-chief a cautious guardian against the explosive consequences of words. We feared less the misspelling than the misinterpretation, less the error of syntax than the fury of power. Words, I discovered, are volatile minerals; handled carelessly, they erupt.

Then came a metamorphosis. I abandoned the stern corridors of foreign affairs for the playful theatre of entertainment. Laughter replaced solemnity; wit became my instrument. To write comedy was to carve openings where heaviness once ruled, to discover that even politics hides beneath a mask of farce. I became, unexpectedly, the duelist of humor, trading blows on the page with Haj Mahfouz, one of the region’s great writers. Readers responded not with arguments but with affection, sending me letters drenched in humanity — letters that arrived by post, carrying the scent of stamps and journeys.

Later still, another reincarnation: sports journalism. A different rhythm, a different crowd. Yet the same secret pulse of storytelling drew them in . It was as though the river of writing could flow into any channel, so long as one trusted its course. And yet — despite applause, despite wit, despite attention — I never truly believed myself to be anything other than a reporter. The front page was my conscience; facts were my faith. Everything else was performance.

But careers, like bodies, tire. The day came when I set the pen aside, deliberately turning my back on the tide of news. For years, I kept silence. When at last I returned, the alchemy was gone — the golden ease of narrative, the playful sparkle of wit had deserted me. What remained was something leaner, harder, but enduring: the instinct to analyze, to see in every event the hidden geometry of power. Analysis, unlike style, does not fade; it calcifies, like bone.

And yet the years extract their toll. A lifetime of deadlines, debates, and disputes etches itself into the body until one carries not just memories, but illnesses like scars. Still, I cannot call it a waste. For to be a journalist is to wrestle with reality in its rawest form, to risk oneself in the fragile gamble that truth can be uttered at all.

Perhaps I have lost the brightness of style, but not the habit of questioning. And that, I think, is the final irony of this life: even when the voice falters, the listening continues. For words do not merely leave us — they shape us, hound us, preserve us in their reflection. What I learned through all those metamorphoses — politics, laughter, sport, silence — is that the pen does not simply record life. It invents the self who holds it.

The Silence Between Thought and Machine

Today indeed we inhabit a threshold moment in history: the dawning era of artificial intelligence, where names like ChatGPT and DeepSeek have become almost household words, promising effortless assistance in tasks that once required long hours of toil. The rituals of the old wordsmith — thumbing through dictionaries in search of a resonant synonym, pacing through sentences aloud until they struck the ear just right, wrestling with paragraphs until they carried the weight of thought — are steadily vanishing. What once demanded slow patience and intimate struggle is increasingly streamlined into near-instant polish.

Yet in this quiet evolution — perhaps even a revolution — lurks a subtle paradox. These machines can improve our clarity, refine our rhetoric, and imbue our words with a surface elegance. But they cannot originate what stirs within us before it takes form. The genesis of thought — the fragile, unshapely, half-formed murmuring of consciousness — remains irreducibly human.

Martin Heidegger, in reflecting on technology, warned of the danger of “enframing”: the tendency for tools not simply to serve us, but to reshape how we see the world, compressing it into what is calculable, repeatable, and useful. Language itself can fall prey to this narrowing, becoming a mere conveyor of information rather than the house of Being itself. In this sense, AI does not so much liberate language as risk confining it — rendering it efficient, uniform, safe. What is lost in the process is the tremor of uncertainty, the halting beauty of articulation born of hesitation.

Marshall McLuhan, meanwhile, would remind us that “the medium is the message.” AI is not only a writing assistant but also a new medium of thought, one that reshapes how we come to conceive of ideas themselves. If writing with pen and ink invited slowness — a lingering intimacy between thought and hand — then writing with AI entrances us with speed and fluency. Our danger is not that AI will think for us, but that, over time, we may unlearn the slow art of thinking by ourselves.

And yet: here lies the paradoxical gift of its presence. In confronting a machine that mirrors but cannot originate, we are reminded of the mystery of our own minds. The human act of creation begins in silence, in the chaos of inner whispers and unspeakable intuitions. No algorithm can venture into that private wilderness. The machine rearranges, but it cannot dream. It can calculate, but not grieve. It can echo, but not wonder.

This age of AI is less about replacement than about reflection. It compels us to ask: What is it in us that cannot be replicated? Perhaps it is not the elegance of our sentences, not the polish of our arguments, but the very struggle behind them — the vulnerability of trial and error, the stubborn reaching beyond the known. That struggle is what makes thought alive.

So while the days of wrestling with a mirror and a sentence may be fading, what remains irreplaceable is the interior act — messy, unfinished, human. AI automates the surface of expression; the depths of meaning are still ours to uncover. The challenge ahead is not to become obsolete alongside our machines, but to remember, ever more fiercely, what in us cannot be automated: the solitary courage to think, to feel, and to speak in our own inimitable voice