*The Internal News Report | Maya Tevet Dayan | 6 Minutes on Friday | 27.2.2026*
Let me tell you a beautiful story. This week I received a message. It was from a reader named Ilana. She asked if it would be alright to send me a few WhatsApp recordings from a conversation she had with a friend. She wrote gently that it was a conversation they’d had following my last column, about closing a door. And that any response from me would be received with love.
I immediately told her of course.
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Ilana sent me seven voice messages on WhatsApp. In one, she speaks with her friend about the idea of doors that open and close. In the next, her friend responds and tells her how wonderful she finds her thoughts, and then says she’s not surprised because she knows Ilana writes too. Then Ilana answers her and encourages her to write as well, really urging her. And then they return to the idea of closing a door behind you and mention other columns of mine.
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I listened to those messages in sequence as if I were a fly on the wall of their conversation, and when they ended, I leaned back and felt as though my heart was expanding and softening.
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Partly because these two friends are so good to one another, so full of love and appreciation for each other.
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But also because of their insistence on lingering and speaking about meanings, about thoughts, on encouraging one another to showcase their talents, their wisdom, their precision. There was no small talk in it. Nothing of what is happening outside. None of the oppressive headlines of recent weeks. They didn’t speak about anyone, didn’t gossip, didn’t look outward at all, only inward, toward their own inner inquiry.
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And it felt like a live broadcast from the field, only this time from the field of the heart.
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Wow, how thirsty my soul was for that: to stop listening to all the external news reports and tune in to the internal news reports, like the one Ilana delivered to me, live from the WhatsApp studio of her life.
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And as I was about to write and thank her, I found another message from her. She explained why communication between her and this particular friend can only happen through voice recordings, and how my own six recorded minutes entered her friend’s life. Finally she thanked me on behalf of both of them, and when she signed their names I learned that Ilana is not her name alone. The two friends share that name. Both of them are Ilana.
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And so after this live broadcast from the hearts of the two Ilanas, I remembered something small that is actually very big: you can always decide what to think, and when to think it. And how much time to give it. And how deeply. Even if the voices outside grow louder, the opinions roar, the interpretations are decisive, and the air fills with news, posts, and prophecies.
In other words, you can always be Ilana and Ilana.
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And because of that, I decided to defy the headlines of the hour and went to a few Instagram pages that offer only good news. These are pages that specialize in shining a spotlight on things that are good or moving or profound, regardless of what is happening outside.
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Those are exactly the pages I want to be in right now. That is exactly where I want to direct my awareness.
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And immediately I found a wealth of reports about acts of kindness there. For example, hospital nurses who, after a patient dies, cut out the sheet with the final ECG tracing and place it in a small vial to give the family a keepsake they call “a heartbeat in a bottle.” Or a daughter whose father made her swear before he died that she would continue, in his name, to buy her mother a gift and flowers every year on Valentine’s Day, and she does. She buys and sobs, then brings them to her mother and sobs, and everything is steeped in so much beauty and longing.
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Then I saw a new trend in airports, where an entire crowd of strangers cheers for someone returning home - it is so funny and so wonderful. And finally I saw the figure skater Amber Glenn receiving a WhatsApp message from none other than Madonna after performing a routine to one of her songs.
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Every time we read a troubling news item, we miss a moving and compassionate story outside the news. And sometimes all it takes is one minute to turn our gaze. Then another minute. And another. Until it accumulates.
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And I want to end with two things - first, a reminder to myself that while we are passing here through a dark channel of history, there are other life forms alongside us living quite well. One post on those joyful pages spoke about the tardigrade - a microscopic creature that looks like a dust mite and is in fact the most resilient animal in nature. It survives at zero degrees, at a hundred degrees, in radiation and in a vacuum. So here is an example of where resilience and strength truly reside.
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Besides that, it mentioned the octopus, which has three hearts, blue blood, and nine brains. And it can edit its own RNA. So here is an example of flexibility in the face of reality.
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And it also mentioned the immortal jellyfish, called that because it can repeatedly return its body’s cells to their earliest developmental stage and begin its life cycle again, and thus essentially never dies of old age.
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I truly, truly recommend that everyone visit pages like these. I will place two links here for anyone who’s interested. And I also want to remind you one last time that this Sunday we begin our Spring Inspiration Season - 10 weeks of communal writing with me - and that too is a wonderful way to be resilient and flexible with reality, and to go deep like Ilana and Ilana. Because in the Inspiration Season we decide what Sundays should really look like, how a week should begin, and then we listen to ourselves, to poetry, to inspiration and writing over everything else. That is what it looks like when we decide what to focus on and how much to focus on it. It is something so clarifying. So wonderful. No wonder it has become an anchor in these times for so many people. So you do not have to write with us, but you do have to tilt your ear toward the internal news edition of your own heart, which is the most important news edition of all.
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Wishing all of us Shabbat Shalom,
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*Maya Tevet Dayan*