Background
On the 10th anniversary of 9/11 I hopped on a plane and flew from Budapest to London. It was remarkably empty - go figure. That was exactly 15 years ago. I arrived with my carry-on suitcase at a cold, badly insulated, single-glazed, 150-year-old basement flat in West London, where we learned to make friends with mice and dampness. A few days later our boxes followed along with my then-girlfriend. After unpacking, buying some IKEA, and getting internet, this photo was taken of me. On it, I’m smiling like an idiot with our first shared meal which consisted of a wonderfully stale frozen pizza and a lovely (probably warm) lager. Crucially, however, we are in our new home. In London.
We went to London to get our master’s from Imperial College. Which we did. It wasn’t easy - to put it mildly - and it wasn’t always smooth sailing for our relationship either, but we worked our way through it. Given that she’s now been my wife for nearly 10 years and the mother of our beautiful children, I’d say our little trial by fire in the basement flat went rather well. So much so that we stayed. I got my PhD there, and we both started our careers there: she started straight after her master’s, and I did too after my PhD (writing my thesis on the tube). Along the way, we made friends and irreplaceable memories. And we both changed. A lot.
Ten years ago (exactly), I already wrote about what living abroad in London and going to a tier-A uni did to us here. That was after spending 5 years abroad. The next 5 years were still spent in London as working professionals, learning to navigate corporate ladders and sharpening our skills. I wouldn’t have spent it anywhere else in the world. London still is, and to us always will be, one of the best places in this world (with all its many faults). Then COVID hit, the world changed, and so did our plans for a cross-American road trip. Instead, we made something much better: our daughter.
This relatively minor life event (and to a degree our annoyance with Brexit) prompted our exit, and we moved closer to our families. We settled in Vienna, to be close to them. But not too close. It all depends. A two-hour drive is something Aussies think of as “going to my local shop”, Americans think of as “my commute”, and Central Europeans think of as “a serious trip, we pack and plan for”. In the last 5 years, we bought our first own home, welcomed our son, and settled into our new expat(ish) life in Vienna.
Although the family grew with our own kids and my brothers’ children, sadly we lost almost all our grandparents. Worse still, in a tragically short battle with cancer, we lost mom. The warm light and pillar of our life, gone.
Why are you telling me this?
My story is (mostly) irrelevant to you, except for one important detail: we both had 5475 days fly by with just as many memories, stories, and points of reference. You might even remember where you were on the 10th anniversary of 9/11. Or if you can’t, you surely remember where you were on that horrible day.
That photo of me above - when I look at it, it literally feels like yesterday. I know that guy. I know what he’s thinking and what he wants and doesn’t want. I know that flat, that horrible glass table, and that warm fizzy lager. Just as I remember vividly how it felt coming out of my viva after 2 hours. Or collapsing and nearly fainting in Kingston Hospital’s operating theater when my daughter wasn’t crying for 2 minutes after she was born. Or signing the contract of our house purchase. Or lovingly welcoming our son together with my wife. 15 years is a lot and yet it’s nothing. Some memories pierce through it like skyscrapers piercing through a low-flying cloud over New York. They are so sharp, so alive that the time between now and them collapses and swallows you.
15 years is a lot. Yet it’s nothing. I’ll soon be 40. If I’m very lucky, I might get three more of these. Three. But I might not get so lucky, and then it’s only two. If that.
In a bitterly cold, pitiless universe, suspended in eternal darkness and emptiness, here we are on this little blue dot. Sitting in our warm homes with a phone in our hands that has all of humanity’s knowledge and an infant superintelligence at our fingertips. Eating calorie dense food, in abundance and to excess, doing trivially easy jobs, and leading lives that’d make anyone from just a hundred years ago turn green with envy.
Let’s put aside the mind-blowing 3.5 billion years of unbroken evolutionary chain that led from some proto-cell floating around some hydrothermal vent at the bottom of an ocean to your brain looking at a screen right now. Yeah, let’s put that aside. Let’s just focus on humans for now. Roughly 100 billion of us have lived and died before now. And maybe (hopefully) trillions will follow.
All we are is a ridiculously short flash of light - one sparkle among a billion flickering across the sea on a sunny day. Each of us, one little flash. And gone. All our plans, fears, goals, and triumphs - there in a single flash.
That’s us. And within that flash is 15 years. And maybe, another. That’s all there is.
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