I am currently watching the 9-1-1 TV series on Disney+, specifically the episode “Death and Taxes” from season 6, from which I am taking a break to write this.

One of the main characters was clinically dead for about three seconds in a previous episode before being revived and falling into a coma. Later, in the episode I am watching, while recovering, he speaks with a close friend about how he’s changed. Since his “death,” he doesn’t feel like his old self—but he tries to act like he is, at least for everyone else’s sake.

His friend responds with a very Stoic sentiment: that we don’t owe anyone the version of ourselves we used to be. We’re never exactly the same from one day to the next.

It reminded me, first of all about a line in Doctor Who:

“We all change. When you think about it, we’re all different people all through our lives, […] You gotta keep moving, so long as you remember all the people that you used to be”.

And then I thought of Seneca, All we have is the constant of change. Life is not what we have lived so far. That part belongs to “death”. Life is also not what is left to live, because that’s not at all a given. You might be breathing your last breath and you have no idea. Nothing about the future is a given. So what are we left with? All that we are left with is right now, that present instance of a moment. That instantaneous split-second moment between the past and the future.

It’s more complex than that though, and that’s the beauty of life. Our past, the part that we agreed that it belongs to “death”, is part of our memories. Our present self is basically the accumulation of all our memories with the addition of the present moment. As we move forward in time all we do is add this new fleeting moment to our collection of memories that we call our life.

So, how does change come into this, the change that they talked about in 9-1-1?

Alright let’s take an analogy. Think of our life so far as a stack of papers. Every paper is an instance of your life. The stack of papers at moment n is different from the stack of papers at moment n+1, because the previous one doesn’t have the memory of that +1. We changed. We change at every instance of our lives. Who we are in the next moment is 100% dependent on the choices we make in the next instance of time and the next one after that. The sum of all the instances in our life is our life.

So, what do we have then? Two things and only two things. Our present moment and the choice we make before moving to the next moment until our last one.