#101: The last breath

Good evening,

This week’s edition has come from small propeller plane flights between four different countries, which are not conducive to writing legibly with a pen and paper..

I spent the first of these flights thinking about my grandmother, who passed away a few months ago. The date marked another month since her passing.

Family is extremely important to me, and we are very close, so it was an extremely significant loss, as my grandma was the heart of the family.

Her death has had a deeply profound impact on my life and my outlook on it. Loss does that, so that is no great surprise. But it has had a particularly profound effect because I was with her when the moment came.

We had been living at the hospital, awaiting the inevitable. That night, after 12 hours, I’d gone home to sleep when I overheard a phone call in the background. Something in the tone made me jump out of bed and rush back.

Time moves strangely in moments like that—the short drive felt endless, the world in slow motion. Are those specs of rain on the windscreen? Rain in Madrid in May? How curious, but fitting. It was a few minutes to midnight, so every footstep echoed as I ran through Ramón y Cajal Hospital.

But my perception of time changed forever in the last minutes. My mum, uncle and I sat on either side of her in silence, listening to her breath become more and more fragile, the pauses between inhales stretching out. Finally, a pause became indefinite, and we slowly looked up at each other as the realisation dawned.

Knowing we were minutes and then seconds away from the end, I realised how very long a second is. They say your life flashes before your eyes at the end; I also felt my life with my grandma flash before my eyes. In her nineties, she lived a long, love-filled life, and I was lucky to have so much time with her. Yet, at that moment, I longed for just one more day, one more meal, one more conversation, one more hug.

It’s completely changed my concept of time. I’ve always valued time and used it well on the important things in life. But this experience forced me to reconsider: What does using time well really mean?

Time is our only truly finite resource

Time is our only truly finite resource. We can always make more money, but a minute spent is gone forever. Every minute has very different levels of benefits, but the cost is the same.

Spending fifteen minutes scrolling social media has very different benefits than fifteen minutes on that same phone speaking to a close relative or friend you haven’t seen for a while, yet the cost is the same.

We treat our time with differing levels of respect depending on what bucket of time we’re considering, but the reality is that it is fungible.

Time in our “downtime” bucket is not separate from our “family time” or our “work” buckets. You’re drawing from one single bucket: time.

How will you spend your time this week?

— AJ

On my bedside table:

🎙Podcast: A Millennial Mind - Beyond Money: Exploring the five types of wealth with Sahil Bloom, by my good friend Shivani Pau.

🎙Podcast: You can also hear me, in my professional capacity, discussing the importance of maintaining a cool head during periods of volatility, on the morning of Donald Trump’s inauguration.

💬 Quote: “You can only find out what you actually believe (rather than what you think you believe) by watching how you act. You simply don’t know what you believe, before that. You are too complex to understand yourself.” ― Jordan B. Peterson

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