Dr. Strange is one of my favorite Marvel superheroes. Something about the first part of the movie from the moment that I saw it just stood out to me and even more was what the Ancient One’s last words to Strange were. “We don’t get to choose our time. Death is what gives life meaning. To know your days are numbered and your time is short. You’d think after all this time I’d be ready. But look at me. Stretching one moment out into a thousand just so that I can watch the snow.”
I have thought about those words often. The image of someone who has seen centuries still wanting to stretch a single moment into a thousand pieces just to watch snow fall. That is the thing about time. You never know you are in a moment until it has passed.
On 2026-07-04 a Saturday a bit earlier I had a conversation with my uncle. A trivial one. Something simple. It lasted around ten minutes and then we went on our own way. A couple of minutes later roughly thirty or forty or maybe an hour the time seems a bit blurry now, he passed away in my arms while I was giving him CPR. Amidst all of that I was watching his four year old boy in the corner who was about to eat with his dad. He was in shock looking at the whole ruckus around him. The situation made no sense to him. He understood nothing. Which is both a blessing and a curse. In the moment I heard screams and rushed straight to his home. I found him at the foot of his couch with his wife screaming crying and wailing. I tried my best but you cannot fight it sometimes. You just have to let go. I lost his pulse midway through the CPR.
I have been reading Meditations since highschool and practicing stoicism in my own way. Memento mori has always been there in the back of my head. I knew that me or the people I love and care for will one day no longer be. I had accepted that as a fact. But some days it never feels so real until one day someone close to you passes away in your arms.
(you can know a thing is true for years and still not know it. Not really. Not until it has a face and a name and a pulse that stops under your hands.)
Life seems long when you are living it. The days drag. The hours stretch. You look at the calendar and see years ahead and you think there is time. There is always time. But time is not a river. It is a glass that shatters and you spend the rest of your life stepping on the pieces.
We are here for a brief moment. A single breath in the long quiet of the universe. A blink. And in that blink we experience everything. Bitterness and fear. Joy and anxiety. Love and loss. We pack whole universes into our brief years and then we are gone and the world does not stop. It does not even pause. The snow keeps falling. The sun keeps rising. The four year old boy grows up with a memory that will fade into a feeling he cannot name.
People spend their whole lives trying to find meaning. We build things. We write things. We love and we lose and we love again. We tell ourselves stories about what happens after. We invent heavens and reincarnations and cosmic reunions. We do this because the alternative is too heavy to carry. The alternative is that this is it. This brief flicker of consciousness between two eternities of nothing.
(and maybe that is what makes it so beautiful. The brevity. The scarcity. The fact that it ends.)
But no matter how much we cope with death once it hits suddenly it is so baffling. You think you are ready. You have read the books. You have said the prayers. You have sat with the idea and made your peace with it. And then it happens and all of that preparation evaporates like morning dew and you are left standing there with nothing but the cold reality of someone who was here and is now not here and will never be here again.
What else can we do than live in those brief moments that accumulate to what we call a person’s life. The ten minute conversation. The sound of a four year old boy who does not yet understand why his father will not wake up. These are the things we have. These small imperfect finite things. They are not enough and they are everything.
(stretching one moment out into a thousand just so that I can watch the snow.)