[What Came Before]

Basically, the moment when you realized the Now was ephemeral and that you would eventually grow to be old (and die).

I don't know if I'm just flattering myself or not, but I came to think about this for the first time when I was 6.

I was thinking about how people grow old and then die, and then I realized I would one day grow old and have to be ready to accept death. I also remember worrying about it being painful. My final sentiment was "that won't be for a long time, worry about it later". (Ah, the innocence of not knowing about murder, terminal disease, and catastrophic accident!)

22 years later, I'm still trying to come to grips with it. At least now I reassure myself by thinking "well, you might just get capped in the face and be dead before you know it!"

[What Came Before]

I think I was 9 and suddenly realised I had to face my own death. It felt a horrific injustice - a child given a death sentence? A child having to face death? There was a rising terror and - then it'd blank out. Happened a second time shortly after. I suspect there's some sort of suppressor system built into my skull, developed from evolution.

[What Came Before]

I have a distinct memory - validated as much as I can by the corroborating memories of my family - of losing consciousness standing up from a bathtub of hot water at age six, for about 4 minutes. It was, in fact, seamless to me from the moment I stood up until my Mom woke me - let's not think about a child being alone in a bathtub for 4 minutes alone. I've long stopped blaming most people for their words and actions. But I lost 4 minutes.

Also, it was common knowledge around my house that my Mom's Dad had died in the year before I was born. So information available, the brain/I began philosophizing, thinking about time after life, being unborn before life, thinking about the transition.

However, the thing that got me most about those thoughts, that to this day can cause a subtle approximation of what Callan is talking about, a feeling I started having regularly from 7 to 17, was forever.

No matter what, existence, non-existence, implosion, explosion, dissolution, or any other form of transition, for creatures such as ourselves, at the perceptual commons of current biology, forever is the one sure thing. No escape.

[What Came Before]

I can't recall when I'd first had that moment, but being a depressive, it's been there a while. But I think the most decisive one was a hypoglycemic moment about 4-5 years ago, when I passed out one morning. Woke up five minutes later on the floor covered in a cold sweat, my father wild and shouting my name above me. Both mom and dad seconds from calling 911. Never happened again, but I'd say that was the more...concrete moment of mine. What if it happens again and no one's around to help me wake? I think about that sort of thing a lot.

[What Came Before]

forever is the one sure thing. No escape.

Look into a philosophical concept called a "Boltzmann Brain" it's trippy shit.

also, I'm not even sure about forever

I feel like quoting things today, so here, have this little shit nugget:

And when the hourglass has run out, the hourglass of temporality, when the noise of secular life has grown silent and its restless or ineffectual activism has come to an end, when everything around you is still, as it is in eternity, then eternity asks you and every individual in these millions and millions about only one thing: whether you have lived in despair or not.
Soren Kierkegaard, "The Sickness Unto Death"