In his hotel room in Tel Aviv, Canadian Artur Wilczynski has quickly adopted a routine intended to keep him alive: His smartphone flashes an alert that missiles are incoming, and he heads to a sub-basement bomb shelter to wait out the latest attack by Iran, listening for the exploding sky to go quiet again.

Right now, there’s no way back to Canada for the retired public servant, who was visiting Israel from Ottawa as part of an international delegation invited by the country’s foreign ministry to meet with members of the LGBTQ+ community.

There’s no magic eraser for life’s messy canvas, as 22-year-old Charlotte Ahern could tell you firsthand if she wasn’t holding her breath through the pain.

Once a month, Ms. Ahern sits in a dentist-type chair, dons protective glasses and cranks the volume on her noise-cancelling headphones, usually to Pink Floyd’s The Great Gig In the Sky.