We are told: “We have two lives. The second begins when we realize we have only one.”

The sooner we realise, our first and only life is going to be lived as it could be lived… For many that realisation comes very close to their end. Though, some philosophers say we are all born equal. I beg to differ. We are born unequal… Some with silver spoon in their mouth, some golden ones and some no spoons at all… Many of us have to struggle and suffer a lot more than others… But in Death more or less we are equal. At the end of it all, it is 6 ft of earth or a handful of ashes.

A long time back, I worked as an Org change and transformation consultant at KAUST Thuwal, Jeddah… Btw full name of KAUST is King Abdulla University of Science and Technology… It is apt to say, it is more of a modern showcase monument than a university. Started by the King of Saudi Arabia in his name and well-funded by Aramco, it is said to be the second richest university in the world after Harvard, in endowment holding. That riches and opulence was there everywhere. I don’t know which other university in the world has its own harbour, lighthouse and a long beach that too facing the verdant Red Sea… And inside, all of us had the big screen Macs in addition to the latest and top most versions of MacBook Pros…

One of the humorous anecdotes I heard there was about its inauguration… It was shared by many. So I reckon it as true. It so seems, during the inauguration, many a times, King Abdulla happened to hear the word KAUST… and he summoned the Aramco sr. exec, who was also the de facto “RULER” of the university to clarify. And that exec replied it stands for King Abdulla University of Science and Technology. It is said, the king got into rage, how dare you shorten my name like that… Better you change it or you had it… And the very next day, they put up the name board in full…

And King Abdulla did pass away, when I was still working there. To my surprise, he was buried in an unmarked grave. This is in accordance with the austere Islamic tradition of Wahhabism, which opposes public displays of wealth and mourning to emphasize equality before God. His grave is located in the Al Oud cemetery in Riyadh and is marked with a simple, plain stone.

So I thought, at the end of the day, death makes us equal in one way or other. Though there was a Shah Jahan who built at a great cost and cruelly a mausoleum and modern day Shah Jahans do that, most of us don’t get there. Though there can smell a bit of inequality there, there is another aspect of death, where we are absolutely equal. No one. Absolutely no one can predict the time of leaving. You can be a prince or pauper. If Alexander had to leave behind all the kingdoms he conquered at an early age, that points to just that.

And here, the philosophers join in like a chorus. Seneca reminds us that the problem is not that life is short, but that we waste much of it. His words sting, because they are true—we squander hours, days, years, as if they were endless. Marcus Aurelius, the emperor who wrote to himself in the quiet of his tent, whispers: “You could leave life right now. Let that determine what you do and say and think.” His is not a lofty abstraction but a practical tool, a way to live with integrity now, not later. And then Tagore, with the gentleness of a poet, offers another measure altogether: “The butterfly counts not months but moments, and has time enough.” A life is not weighed in years but in the intensity of its moments, in the beauty of its flight.

Albert Camus, who wrote of the absurdity of existence, died suddenly in a car crash, with an unused train ticket in his pocket. That unused ticket is the perfect symbol of all our plans, our “later,” being rendered null by the absurd randomness of fate. His death is the brutal proof of what the philosophers intuited: that the second life cannot be postponed.

And so we return to the fulcrum. We often assume our first life begins with a cry in a delivery room. But is that truly the start? For decades, we may only be inheriting a life—a script written by others, a path laid down by circumstance, a collection of expectations and conditioned responses. We accumulate a name, a history, a personality, a set of possessions. But is the person living this existence truly awake, or are they a custodian of a pre‑fabricated self?

Life is a see‑saw, the fulcrum never quite in the middle. Sometimes the shorter side sinks, not because of weight, but because of where awareness rests.

This inherited existence—the one of silver spoons or none, of struggle and societal metrics—is the prelude. It is the raw material, the long, often‑unbalanced side of the see‑saw weighted with the past. It is a reaction, not a creation.

Your first life begins at the fulcrum.

It begins not when you are born to the world, but when the world is born to you. It starts in the silent, seismic shock of realization—the same one that marks the beginning of the so‑called “second life.” This is the paradox: your first life and your second life are the same life, born in the same instant.

The moment you realize you have only one life is the moment you become truly alive within it. It is the moment you shift from being a passenger to the driver, from a custodian to the author. The fulcrum point is where unconscious inheritance ends and conscious living begins.

Before the fulcrum, you had a biography. After the fulcrum, you have a story you are actively writing.

So, when does your first life begin?

It begins when you trade Seneca’s “waste” for Aurelius’s “purpose.” It begins when you stop counting months like a mortal and start counting moments like Tagore’s butterfly. It begins when the nightmare of the unmarked grave no longer frightens you, but focuses you on the vibrant, fragile ordinariness of the now.

Your first life begins when you choose to place the fulcrum of your awareness in the present and finally, deliberately, begin to balance the weight of all you have been with the possibility of all you might yet be.

Author’s Note These reflections came up during a memorial service for All Souls’ Day 2 November, observed at Kanzeon Zendo. The names of the departed, the scent of incense, and the silence between thoughts were the first drafts of this chronicle. This is the day the veil between the living and the dead is considered thinnest. And so, behind this thin veil, Camus and Alexander, King Abdullah and Karen, Ann Marie and Sheela, and my late father, Sankara—all find their place on the same altar of remembrance, embodying the very equality I sought to describe.

And perhaps the altar itself is a see‑saw of memory and presence: the weight of absence pressing one side down, the lightness of gratitude lifting the other.