I’ll tell you a short story, Tosin. Before I do, I want you to imagine a few scenarios to put it in context. Picture yourself sitting in your living room late at night, doing something utterly mundane maybe scrolling Twitter or eating. And then NEPA strikes, the power goes off. You know that brief moment of disorientation that follows? It’s very quick, more like a flicker of awareness where you remember again that darkness is actually the default at night, and light was just a borrowed convenience. Alternatively, think of when you go to a party and suddenly the DJ stops the music. The silence that follows is usually very strange. It reveals how much the noise was hiding. It’s also a very quick moment that jolts you to a different reality. This was same for me. It happened pretty early on in my life. That day, nothing tragic had happened. Nobody died or any of the sort. It was just an ordinary day, and I was alone in my room. Out of nowhere, I started to cry. You wouldn’t believe why I was crying lol. It just suddenly dawned on me that I am going to die. It was just one brief moment I realized, in my body, that I am going to die. Now, it’s one thing to know you’ll die, everybody knows that conceptually. But it’s another thing entirely to feel it physically without a triggering event. That’s how I felt. That someday, the person I call “I”, with all his thoughts and questions and strange, burning curiosities, will simply vanish in a real, undeniable, unremarkable way. A total and complete off switch. Mind you, I wasn’t thinking about death that day. Can’t remember where my mind went to but all of a sudden, it hit me so violently, I could feel the chills physically. The tears seemed to have come from somewhere too deep to name. Something fell off my eyes that day and something older grew in their place. I can’t explain it, but that day I could sense that something invisible had shifted. I know it wasn’t sadness or even fear. It was something much colder, more primal. It was chilling, clinical and viscerally clarifying. The world didn’t fall apart per se, it just tilted a bit. Since then, I’ve never been able to live at the surface of things. That moment turned me toward the truth. I can’t not ask why: we’re here, why we believe what we believe, why no one seems to notice the rituals we perform without question. I can be walking through the magnificent roads of NY as a big shot lawyer in a suit, and I still feel what the subway feels. I notice the contrast in very elementary things. I can comfortably connect random, unusual things that most people around me don’t seem to notice. I sometimes miss the period before it in a sense. When I was younger, I would go into my head for a minute and then snap back to reality. It would feel weird for a while, but then I would adapt and continue playing. I miss being able to snap back. I think that day i got in, had the rare privilege to witness the edges of my own mortality, and I think I never fully snapped back. Even when I don’t intend to, I’m unconsciously conscious of every current around me. It’s a kind of unbearable aliveness to everything.