rain falls on the glass
a faint echo in the chest
life opens, then waits
If I could share one lesson I wish I had learned earlier in life, it is this: everything you are is a combination of two forces — what you’ve absorbed from others who came before you, and the endless biology that hums beneath your skin. The books you’ve read, the voices you’ve listened to, the gestures you’ve copied without knowing. And at the same time, the rhythm of your blood, the chemicals of your brain, the silent architecture of your cells.
Which means something simple but sharp: you must choose wisely who you spend time with, and you must keep exposing yourself to new things.
This came to me not as a neat philosophy, but during a moment I wasn’t sure I would survive.
When I was twenty-five, I had what I can only describe as a near-death experience. The details aren’t spectacular. No bright tunnels, no divine voices. It was quieter than that.
It happened in a hospital, under fluorescent light that hummed like a dying insect. I had been careless with my health — too much travel, too little sleep, too much ignoring the signals the body sends when it is tired of being ignored. My body had finally called its debt.
I remember lying on the bed, the white sheets smelling faintly of bleach, listening to the slow beep of the monitor. Each beep was a reminder that biology had the first and final word. I had thought of myself as a mind floating above the body. That illusion dissolved. I was chemistry, electricity, fragile tissue stitched together by chance.
And at the same time, as I looked back, I saw how much of myself had been borrowed. The music I loved was introduced by a friend. The books that had shaped me came from a teacher’s hand. The way I gestured when I spoke was stolen from someone I once admired. Even my laughter had an accent I had picked up without knowing.
Everything was learned or inherited. Nothing stood alone.
I remember closing my eyes, not sure if I would wake again, and realizing how foolish I had been to treat life as if it were self-made.
If you are built from the fragments of others, then the choice of who you let close is the choice of who you become. If you are bound by biology, then ignoring the body is ignoring the vessel of every possibility.
It sounds obvious. But at twenty-five, in that sterile room, it felt like revelation.
When I recovered, the world looked slightly altered. The lesson stayed with me, not as a constant philosophy but as a rhythm, surfacing when I least expect it.
I think of it when I walk through Bern on rainy mornings, the streets slick with reflections, my shoes tapping against the cobblestones. Each step is mine, but each rhythm belongs also to the footsteps I once followed: my father on a forest path, my friends on city nights, the strangers I imitated without noticing.
I think of it when I eat a meal in a new place. The flavors are not mine, yet they become part of me. A soup in Kyoto, spiced bread in Palermo, fruit in Slovenia. They fold into memory, changing who I am in ways I can’t predict.
I think of it when I sit with someone whose presence expands my horizon, reminding me that exposure is not optional. Without new input, life calcifies. Without new hands to learn from, without new places to dissolve into, you repeat the same old loops.
The near-death moment taught me something else: time is short. It is not enough to simply inherit. You must curate. You must decide what stays and what doesn’t.
A friend once told me: you are the average of the five people you spend the most time with. I laughed then, dismissing it as cliché. But in the hospital bed, it no longer seemed like a joke. It was arithmetic. I had been careless in my social diet. I had let myself consume whatever was near, without noticing how it shaped me.
Since then, I’ve tried — imperfectly — to be deliberate. To spend time with people who expand rather than shrink, who question rather than dictate, who live as explorers rather than passengers.
It isn’t easy. The inertia of habit is heavy. But I’ve learned that the company you keep is not decoration. It is architecture.
Sometimes, at night, I remember the beep of that hospital machine. The sound was both terrifying and strangely reassuring. Terrifying because it reminded me of fragility. Reassuring because it proved I was still alive.
I carry that sound with me now like a metronome. A reminder to pick carefully, to keep learning, to never let my biology be forgotten, and to never let my social world become stagnant.
The strange thing is: the moment that almost ended me is the one that gave me the clearest perspective.
It told me that life is borrowed, patched together from fragments of others and the raw material of flesh. It told me that each choice — of food, of books, of friends, of habits — is a way of programming who I will become. It told me that exposure is survival, that novelty is not luxury but necessity.
It told me that to live wisely, I must live deliberately.
I wish I had learned this earlier. But perhaps that is how lessons work. They arrive late, when you are ready.
Still, sometimes I imagine whispering to my younger self: Be careful with who you keep close. Be reckless in what you expose yourself to. Your body is finite. Your mind is porous. Choose well, and often.
Last week, while walking home late, I passed a small café I had never noticed before. The door was ajar. Inside, a single light glowed. I paused, hearing faint music, though I couldn’t place the song. For a moment I considered going in. But something in me hesitated. I walked on.
Even now, I wonder: had I stepped inside, whose story would I have carried away with me? Whose fragment would I have added to my own?
Because everything we are is made of such choices. And sometimes, the ones we miss haunt us most of all.
life 