Someone Made Room for Me

Every single one of us is here because someone else isn’t. Someone had to step aside for me to exist, just like one day, I’ll step aside for someone else.

I spent an afternoon a few years back with my buddy Josh, before we joined teams to work on Win The Night podcast. It was one of those days where the conversation flows so naturally that you don’t realize how deep you've gone until you’re in the thick of it. (Honestly, it would have been a great episode, LOL.)

We talked about life, our wins, our regrets, the weird moments that make us who we are. Caught up on give-or-take 10 years of growing apart. And eventually, as these conversations tend to do, it turned to death.

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The Perspective That Changed Everything

At first, it was in the abstract. What happens after? How do we make peace with it? The usual questions. But then he said something that stopped me in my tracks. I’m barely paraphrasing, but it was something like:

“I used to be upset about death, until I realized that someone else made room for me, so it’s only fair.”

That hit me. Hard.

I sat with those words for a long time. At first, it was just a cool perspective… something poetic, something profound. But the more I lived with it, the more I started to realize how true it was. Every single one of us is here because someone else isn’t. It’s a cycle, an exchange, if you will.

Life and death aren’t opposing forces. They are two sides of the same coin. Someone had to step aside for me to exist, just like one day, I’ll step aside for someone else.

That doesn’t make the fear go away. To be honest, for me, it almost makes it worse. I’m still afraid of the unknown, of the end. But it reframes it. It turns death from a thief into a giver. It reminds me that my time here isn’t just mine. It’s a gift, it was borrowed, passed down, made possible by those who came before.

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Borrowed Time and What We Leave Behind

And in a strange way, that’s comforting. It makes me want to live more fully, to make my time worth the space I’ve been given.

To leave something behind… Not in the grand, legacy-building way, but in the small ways that matter. The kindness, the memories, the stories.

Because one day, when I step aside, someone else will be standing where I once was. And I want them to feel like the space was worth inheriting.

I don’t know if my friend meant for his words to stick with me like this. Maybe it was just something he said in passing, something that helped him make peace with things. But it became something I think about often.

Life is borrowed, and one day, we give it back. And somehow, knowing that makes it all feel even more valuable.

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