Most of what matters in our lives takes place in our absence.

The line points to a paradox of human experience: the events that most shape us—our birth, the formation of our early world, other people’s private decisions, historical forces, even the moment of our death—often occur without our awareness or control. It suggests humility about personal agency and a recognition that identity and fate are partly authored elsewhere, in rooms we are not in and times we do not witness. Read in a Rushdiean key, it also resonates with themes of exile, migration, and the gaps between lived experience and the stories we tell about it: what “matters” may be precisely what must be reconstructed after the fact, from traces and narratives rather than direct presence.