I nearly died.

I won’t tell you what happened. Not yet. Maybe not ever. Just know that it happened, and that this was the second time I stared at the edge and the edge stared back.

Also, I’m doing great. You’d never know I nearly got my card punched if you saw me a day before, and a day after it happened - in the physical world everything’s the same.

That’s all the context you need.

Before

I’ve been meditating on death for years.

Not in a morbid way. Not in a dark room with candles. In the way a ship captain meditates on the ocean: with respect, with awareness, with the understanding that the thing that carries you is the same thing that can, and will, swallow you at one point.

Death, for me, has always been an anchor. The one fixed point that cuts through every layer of noise, every false urgency, every manufactured crisis. When you remember that you will die, that everyone you love will also die, the trivial, the stupid and the important-looking BS fades away. What remains is what matters.

This practice shaped how I live, how I behave, and how I choose.

When I hug someone I love, I hug them knowing I may not see them in an hour. They may walk out the door and not come back. I’ve seen that happen. More than once.

When I want to call someone, I call them. Because tomorrow is a cheque that may bounce.

When I’m tempted to hold back words that matter, I don’t. Because silence is a debt that collects interest I can’t afford.

This isn’t pessimism. This is the sharpest and the most pragmatic form of gratitude I know.

Inside

Here’s what I didn’t expect.

I always meditated on death as something in the future (The irony, I know. Believe me). Like something that can happen in five years from now. Maybe three months. Or in two weeks. A kind of distant certainty. Close enough to respect, yet far enough to plan around.

I never thought it would be five minutes away.

Not five years. Not five months. Five minutes, or even less. Maybe seconds.

There is a countdown timer above every one of our heads. We know it’s there, we know it’s running out, and we know it reaches zero. We just don’t know when.

I always knew this intellectually. I meditated on it. But knowing the timer exists and hearing it tick in your ear are two entirely different experiences.

In an instant, the illusion of that distance collapsed. The future I meditated on became the present I was drowning in, it didn’t knock, it didn’t ask if I was ready, it came fast, and indifferent.

Here’s what happened when I was sure that this is it, I’m at the end:

While “inside”, I messaged a close friend of mine 8 words: “I think I’m dying. Help X with logistics”. I clearly remember the enormous amount gratitude I felt to have someone who I could trust with such an important task. I knew he’d deliver (and he later told me, he knows I’d do the same for him too, which can’t be more true).

I felt a calm like never before. I was staring at my life’s road coming to an end, and was on terms with it.

Not numb-calm, or scared-calm, or surrendered-calm, not shell shocked-calm, or paniced-calm. Calm like ocean on a winter night. I wasn’t giving up on living either, I had decided I was going to fight for this not to happen, that I’d fight with everything I have, but I won’t “insist”, or plead - does that make sense? It’s very hard to put it in words.

Second feeling was missing people I love. I was sitting there thinking, knowing, that I won’t see them again, that I can’t hold them, or make them laugh again, and that poured an ocean worth of sadness in my heart, and yet again, there was no regret of any kind in that either.

Outside

Lady fate had other ideas. I was given a second chance.

What it changed in me, I can’t fully share. Not because I don’t want to. Because these changes are so precious, so close to my core, that I am fiercely protective of them. The shifts in how I think, how I prioritize, how I see, how I live are beyond my capacity to articulate in a deserving way.

What I can tell you is this:

Before, meditating on death put things around me in perspective. After, it put me, my self in perspective. There’s a difference. One rearranges the furniture. The other redesigns the subatomic particles.

The Wish

I wish everyone could have this experience.

Without the danger. Without staring into the face of it.

I wish you could just… have it injected. The clarity. The recalibration. The silence that follows when the noise finally stops.

But that’s not how it works.

It comes as a whole package with lots of unpleasant minutiae, and depending on your mental models and views, with lots of different emotions. You can’t extract the gold without the fire. You can’t have the sunrise without the night.

The countdown is running. For all of us.

The question isn’t whether it reaches zero. It will.

The question is what you do while it’s still ticking.

Random bits

The trouble is you think you have time

Buddha

Lungs of pleasure are full of oxygen of death

My bad translation of a Persian poem by Sohrab Sepehri