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Is this it?
Pressed against cold mountain stone with bullets flying, the question "Is this it?" meant everything. Now, years later, that same question has become a daily invitation to make each borrowed moment count.
Eric Brown
June 04, 2025
Pressed against cold mountain stone with bullets flying, the question "Is this it?" meant everything. Years later, that same question has become a daily invitation to make each borrowed moment count.
The bullets stopped for a moment, that terrible silence that means either safety or death drawing near. Pressed against cold mountain stone, I asked the question that haunts every warrior's darkest hour:
Is this it?
Not the grand philosophical wondering of a life well-lived or purpose fulfilled, but the raw, animal terror of a twenty-something analyst who never trained for this moment, who signed up to work with signals, not to bleed on foreign soil.
What if there isn't a future for me?
The thought hit harder than the gunfire, more paralyzing than fear itself. All those plans dissolving like mist: the career I'd imagined, the family I'd never have, the life unlived stretching into the void.
I wasn't a soldier with honor to die for, just a kid with a laptop and a gun I barely knew how to use, wondering if this rocky outcrop in the Hindu Kush would be my final classroom, my last lesson.
Is this how it ends?
A life of existence reduced to a few panicked heartbeats, to the taste of dust and fear, to the weight of a weapon in hands that trembled not from cold but from knowing.
The silence stretched like eternity, each second a lifetime of questions: Would they find my body? Would my family know the truth? Would I become another classified casualty, another redacted line in a report?
What if I never see home again?
Home felt like a fairy tale, a place that existed only in memory: coffee shops and traffic jams, arguments about nothing, the luxury of boredom, the gift of tomorrow.
But in that moment, pressed against unforgiving stone with death stalking the mountainside, I learned something about time: how it bends and breaks, how a second can hold a lifetime, how futures collapse into presence.
Is this all there is?
The question wasn't self-pity but naked honesty. The kind that only comes when life hangs by a thread so thin you can feel it fraying.
Then I heard a voice cut through the silence: "Stay low, keep breathing." Simple words, profound truth. Not promises of tomorrow, just instructions for right now.
Breathe. Stay low. Keep going.
Because that's what you do when "Is this it?" becomes "Not yet," becomes "I'm still here," becomes "I made it through another day."
The future I thought I'd lost stretched out before me again, not as certainty but as possibility, earned one breath at a time, one heartbeat after another.
Years later, safe in Colorado, I still hear that question: Is this it?
But now it means something different. Not the terror of ending but the wonder of beginning, the daily choice to keep breathing, to make this borrowed time count.
What if there is a future for me?
What if surviving that moment was just the start of the story? What if every breath since then has been a gift to unwrap, a chance to prove worthy of the time I was given?
The mountains taught me that "Is this it?" is the wrong question. The right one is "What now?"
What now, with this heartbeat?
What now, with this day?
What now, with this life that almost ended on foreign stone but somehow, impossibly, continues?