The Last 7 Minutes

It is almost midnight as I lie in bed, thinking about an epiphany I had the other day. I cannot pretend my life is anywhere near its highs. But I am on the road to recovery.

There are still days when I feel beaten down, when I replay mistakes from the near past and blame myself for them. The weight comes back quietly from time to time, but it is important to face these feelings instead of avoiding them. The other day was one of those moments. I felt overwhelmed again, so I decided to take a few minutes to close my eyes and meditate.

Before I knew it, my mind wandered to a place I had never visited before.

What if this is our last seven minutes of brain activity and we do not know it.

I grew up hearing a theory that after death, the brain remains active for about seven minutes. I do not know whether it is scientifically accurate, but the idea has stayed with me. Not as a fact, but as a question. What happens in that window when the body is gone but the mind has not yet gone quiet. Does the mind reach backward and replay memories? Or does it become something else entirely, a final stream of consciousness untethered from time.

We know that time inside the mind is distorted. Dreams can compress hours into seconds, while brief moments can stretch and expand beyond their limits. Some dreams feel completely real. While inside them, there is no way to distinguish imagination from reality. We feel fear, love, urgency, and relief as vividly as if we were awake. Only later do we realize none of it was happening at all. If the mind can do that in sleep, why would death be any different.

What if, in its final state, the brain slips into something similar. A last internal world built from memory, emotion, and meaning. What if those seven minutes feel real while they are happening, even if they are only fragments shaped by memory. What if seconds feel like hours. What if minutes feel like lifetimes?

I mean, how would we ever know? How could we ever know?

There is a common belief that in our final moments, memories surface. Not as a clean timeline, but as fragments, emotions, and meaning. If that is so, then the last seven minutes of brain activity may be the most important stretch of time we ever experience. Not because it is long, but because it is all that remains.

This thought shifted something in me.

If this really is the last seven minutes playing in my head, then this is my last chance to live the way I choose to. It is one more opportunity to decide how the story feels as it ends. Not to rewrite the past, but to choose how I carry it, how I live it. Calm or regret. Acceptance or resistance. Gratitude or bitterness.

I do not fear death. Death is part of being human. To experience life fully is to accept that it ends. What scares me is the idea that this could be my final seven minutes of consciousness and that I would feel I accomplished nothing. That I would fade quietly, not into darkness, but into irrelevance. Existing only as fragments in the memories of people who once knew me.

This realization gave me something unexpected. Determination. Motivation.

If life is fragile and temporary, then giving up early is not honesty, it is waste. Life is too precious and too precarious to abandon over obstacles that patience can soften and time can resolve.

So I choose to keep writing my story.

Because maybe this is not the last seven minutes. But if it were, I want it to feel honest, I want it to feel alive, I want it to feel like I did not surrender when things became heavy.

This is a reminder to live the last seven minutes the way we want to. Because when the grim reaper finally collects, there is no reset. There is only what we chose to carry with us into the end.