See it while you can

The Night Four Children Broke Me Open

I was not supposed to cry that night.

I had my phone, a quiet room, and what I thought was just another documentary to pass the time. I pressed play without any particular reason. Sometimes you just press play.

The film was called Blink.

By the time it ended, I was sitting in the same position — but I was not the same person.

There is a family in this documentary. A father, a mother, and four children. Ordinary people. The kind you would pass in a supermarket and not think twice about. They laugh the way families laugh. They argue the way families argue. The mother rolls her eyes. The father makes the children giggle at something that isn't even that funny.

And three of those four children are slowly going blind.

Not suddenly. Not dramatically. Slowly. The way evening becomes night — you don't see the exact moment it happens, but at some point you look up and the light is gone.

I kept watching.

And somewhere between a desert sunset in Egypt and a bucket list written in a child's handwriting, I stopped being a viewer.

I became a question.

A question I had been avoiding for a very long time.

Three Children and a Ticking Light

Their names are Mia, Léo, Colin and Laurent.

Mia is the eldest. Thirteen years old, sharp, bossy in the way only the firstborn can be — the kind of child who organizes her brothers before her mother even asks. Léo is the imaginative one, the dreamer, the one who lives in his own world and makes it sound better than yours. Colin is the kooky one — the child who finds humor in places no one else is even looking. And Laurent, the youngest, is seven years old and described by his parents as a philosopher.

A seven year old philosopher.

That detail alone should stop you.

Édith and Sébastien are the parents. French Canadian, based in Montreal, deeply ordinary in the most beautiful sense of that word. They did not sign up to be heroes. They signed up to be parents. And then life handed them something no parent is ever ready for.

Mia was diagnosed first. Retinitis pigmentosa. A rare genetic condition where the cells of the retina slowly die. The field of vision shrinks — gradually, quietly — like someone is tightening a frame around everything you see, until only the center remains. And then one day, even that goes.

There is no treatment. There is no cure. There is only time — and what you choose to do with it.

Shortly after Mia's diagnosis, Colin was diagnosed. Then Laurent.

Three of the four children. The same condition. The same fate. The same disappearing light.

Édith once said that the hardest part was the inaction. That there was nothing they could do medically. Nothing to fight. No battle to show up to. Just a slow, confirmed goodbye to something their children had not yet fully learned to value — because they were children, and children assume the world will always look exactly the way it does today.

Then came the moment that changed everything.

A doctor or an advisor — I do not remember which — suggested that Mia's visual memory be filled with images. Books. Photographs. Pictures of the world.

Édith heard that and made a quiet, fierce decision.

She was not going to show her daughter an elephant in a book.

She was going to take her to see one.

And just like that, a family of six packed their lives into backpacks and left for a year — twenty four countries, one bucket list written entirely by the children, and a single purpose that had nothing to do with tourism.

They were not travelling the world.

They were filling it. Memory by memory. Sunset by sunset. Before the darkness came.

A Bucket List Written in Crayon

Think about the last time you made a list.

Groceries, maybe. A work deadline. A reminder to call someone you keep meaning to call. We make lists for everything — everything except the things that actually matter.

Mia, Colin and Laurent made a list too.

Swim with dolphins. Sleep on a train. See the pyramids. Learn to surf. Ride a camel. Watch a sunrise from a mountain. Laurent — the seven year old philosopher — added one item that made me smile and ache at the same time. He wanted to drink juice on a camel.

Just that. Juice. On a camel.

There is something about a child's bucket list that destroys you softly. Because they are asking for wonder, plain and simple. They have no interest in legacy or achievement or arriving somewhere impressive. They just want to feel the world — its sand, its salt, its cold river water, its ridiculous beauty — before the world becomes something they can only hear and touch and remember.

Édith and Sébastien said yes to every single item.

They traveled on a two hundred dollar daily budget. Hostels. Homestays. Public buses. Local markets. They were not buying luxury — they were buying time dressed up as experience. A safari in Africa. The White Desert in Egypt. The Himalayas. Indonesia. Ecuador. Mongolia. Twenty four countries in one year, with four children, two parents, and a list written partly in the handwriting of someone who still had milk teeth.

And here is the thing that stayed with me long after the film ended.

The children were not sad.

They were luminous.

They ran into rivers. They made friends in languages they did not speak. They laughed until the camera shook. They were doing what children do — living with their whole body, trusting that the person holding their hand knows the way.

It was the parents who carried the weight.

Sébastien, the father — athletic, funny, the one who always found a way to make the children laugh — would sometimes go quiet in a way that had nothing to do with tiredness. Édith would watch her children take in a landscape and you could see it on her face — this mixture of fierce joy and a grief she had learned to fold very small and keep somewhere only she could reach.

They gave their children the world.

And they did it with a broken heart and a full itinerary.

I have met many definitions of courage in my life. As a sailor I met it in storms. As a banker I saw a version of it in crisis rooms. As a writer I find traces of it in the stories people are afraid to tell out loud.

But watching two parents build a year of light for three children walking toward darkness — that is a kind of courage that has no word for it yet.

Born Out of Love, But Lost to Hate

Before Blink, there was Syria.

Long before I watched this documentary, long before I knew the names Mia, Colin and Laurent, something had already broken open inside me. It happened quietly, the way the most important things always do. I was reading about a father in war-torn Syria — a country where buildings had stopped being buildings and streets had stopped being streets. Where childhood had become the most dangerous thing a person could be.

And in the middle of all that rubble, in the middle of smoke and sirens and a world that had completely lost its mind — a father was giving his children a bath.

A simple bathtub. Warm water. His children splashing. Laughing.

Outside, everything was falling apart. Inside that bathtub, for those few minutes, he had built them a world. A small, warm, safe world with soap and laughter and a father's hands making sure nobody slipped.

I could not move when I read that.

I have seen grief perform itself many times. I have seen it in headlines and hashtags and candlelit vigils. But that image — a father and a bathtub in Syria — that was grief with its shoes off. Grief that had given up performing and was just trying to keep the children warm for one more hour.

I dedicated my second book to them.

To the children I never met. To the ones who never made it to a bucket list, who never got a year of twenty four countries, who never drank juice on a camel. I wrote seven words that I meant with everything I had —

***"To the Little Angels of Syria — Born out of love, but lost to hate."***

I still mean them.

And when Blink came into my life, those seven words came back and sat beside me on the couch. Because suddenly I was watching another set of children — loved fiercely, protected completely, given every sunrise their parents could carry — and yet still walking toward a darkness they had no say in.

The geography was different. The circumstance was different. Syria was war. Retinitis pigmentosa is biology. One was built by human hands, the other by fate.

But the children — the children were the same.

Innocent. Luminous. Undeserving of any of it.

And the fathers — the fathers were the same too.

One building joy in a bathtub in a bombed city. One riding a camel across Egypt making his children laugh. Both doing the only thing a father knows how to do when the world stops making sense —

Turn toward their children and say — not today. Today we live.

I have written eight books. I have stood in front of audiences and talked about the mind, about consciousness, about the stories we tell ourselves to survive. But in that moment, watching Blink with the memory of Syria sitting quietly beside me, I was not a mind trainer or an author or any of the hats I have worn.

I was just a man with working eyes, wondering what on earth I had been looking at all this time.

The Boy Who Did Not Know What Darkness Meant

There is a moment in Blink that I have not been able to leave behind.

It comes quietly, the way the most devastating things always do. No background score warning you. No dramatic camera angle preparing you. Just a mother and her youngest child, Laurent, in an ordinary conversation that turned into something I was completely unprepared for.

Laurent is seven years old. He has been told about his condition. His parents have been honest with him, the way good parents are honest — gently, carefully, making sure the truth lands without crushing the child underneath it. He has heard the word blindness. He has grown up alongside it like a word that belongs to his house but whose meaning he has never fully opened.

And then one day he asked his mother.

What does blindness look like?

Édith paused. And then she told him — life will always look the way it does when your eyes are closed.

Laurent absorbed this. The way children absorb things — completely, without armor, without the defense mechanisms we spend decades building.

He had made peace with something he had never truly understood.

And that is the moment my heart went very, very quiet.

Because Édith herself said it. That in answering her son's innocent question, she felt she had taken something from him. That the moment he truly understood — the moment darkness stopped being a word and became a feeling he could close his eyes and touch — she felt she had reached into his childhood and taken a piece of it that she could never put back.

A mother explaining darkness to a child who was born to see.

I have sat with many heavy thoughts in my life. As a sailor I have sat with the ocean at 3am when the water and the sky become the same thing and you feel very small and very alive at the same time. As a writer I have sat with characters who carry sorrows I gave them, and sometimes I have felt guilty for that.

But nothing prepared me for Laurent.

Because Laurent was not sad. That is the part that undoes you completely. He was not angry. He was not asking why. He was a seven year old philosopher — exactly as his parents described him — sitting with one of life's most brutal realities and somehow, in his child's way, making room for it.

He had put darkness on his shelf like it was just another thing the world had given him.

And meanwhile, I am sitting on my couch, with my full uninterrupted vision, and I am realising that I have spent years not truly seeing a single thing.

We talk about mindfulness. We talk about presence. We write blogs and buy journals and set reminders on our phones to breathe. We know all the right words.

Laurent did not know any of the right words.

He just closed his eyes, felt what was coming, and chose to spend his remaining light swimming with dolphins and drinking juice on a camel.

There is a line I have been carrying since I first began writing — that the mind is simple, yet it holds a universe inside. Laurent's universe was being slowly dimmed by something beyond anyone's control. And yet the universe inside him — the curiosity, the peace, the philosopher's quiet — that was burning brighter than most adults I have ever met.

I think about him often.

I think about what it means to know your deadline and still choose wonder.

And then I think about the rest of us.

We Are All Going Blind — We Just Refuse to Know It

Let me ask you something.

When did you last watch a sunset and actually watch it — not photograph it, not think about the caption, not nudge the person next to you to look — just watch it, with your whole self, until it was completely gone?

Take your time with that question.

I asked it to myself after Blink and the silence that followed was not comfortable.

I have lived many lives in this one life. I left the shore as a young sailor, carrying nothing but restlessness and a heart too large for the town I grew up in. I sat in bank cabins and made decisions in suits that never quite felt like mine. I built things as an entrepreneur, watched some of them stand and watched some of them fall, and learned that the falling teaches you more than the standing ever will. I stood in front of classrooms and tried to give young minds something worth carrying. And somewhere in between all of that, I became a writer — because writing was the only place where all the versions of me could sit in the same room without arguing.

I have lived fully. I believe that.

And yet.

When I watched Édith fill her children's visual memory with twenty four countries — safaris and river swims and Himalayan mornings and camel rides at dusk — I felt a quiet shame that had nothing to do with travel.

It had to do with attention.

Because the Pelletier children were not just collecting places. They were collecting presence. Every single moment of that year, they were fully inside their lives — not scrolling past it, not waiting for something better to begin, not saving their real living for a later date that the calendar has not yet confirmed exists.

They had a deadline.

And the deadline made everything sacred.

We tell ourselves we will slow down when things settle. We will be present when life gets less busy. We will call that person when we have more time. We will take that trip when the moment is right. We will sit with our children longer when work eases up. We will watch the sunset tomorrow because today there are other things.

Tomorrow. Later. Eventually. Soon.

These are the words we use to postpone our own lives.

Mia, Colin and Laurent did not have those words. Their parents had quietly, lovingly, removed those words from the family vocabulary and replaced them with one word —

Now.

And here is the truth that Blink sat me down and told me directly —

We are all on a deadline.

Every single one of us.

The only difference between Laurent and you and me is that Laurent's deadline announced itself. It came with a name, a diagnosis, a doctor's voice in a room that went very still. Ours arrived too — the moment we were born — but it came without an appointment, without a calendar notification, without any of the urgency that makes a person finally put down their phone and look up.

We have the same amount of uncertainty they have.

We have the same fragile eyes, the same temporary body, the same borrowed time.

We simply have the luxury of pretending otherwise.

And we have made that luxury into a lifestyle.

I think about the father in Syria again. Building warmth in a bathtub while the world burned outside his door. I think about Sébastien on a camel in Egypt, watching his children laugh, holding his grief in one hand and their joy in the other. I think about every parent who has ever loved a child in impossible circumstances and chosen — against all reason — to choose tenderness.

They all understood something that comfort has made us forget.

That life is not waiting for us to be ready.

It is happening right now, in this moment, while we are busy planning to live it.

The light is on.

The question is whether we are in the room.

See It While You Can

I want you to close your eyes for a moment.

Go on. Just for a moment.

Feel the darkness behind your eyelids. The soft, complete, velvet darkness that Laurent described to his mother without knowing he was describing something most of us will never have to live inside permanently. Just sit there for a breath or two.

Now open them.

Everything is still there. The room. The light. The ordinary, miraculous, taken-for-granted world — exactly where you left it.

That is the gift you woke up with this morning and did not once say thank you for.

I have been a sailor who has stood on a deck at midnight with nothing around him but water and stars and the overwhelming feeling that life is enormous and brief and achingly beautiful. I have been a banker who sat in air-conditioned rooms counting other people's wealth while outside the window the sun was doing something extraordinary that nobody in the room turned to see. I have been a teacher who watched young eyes light up with understanding and felt that perhaps this — this exact moment — was the whole point of everything. I have been a writer who has tried, in book after book, to hold life up to the light and turn it slowly so the reader can see something they recognise but have never had words for.

And in all those lives, in all those rooms, in all those chapters —

I was not always present.

I was there. But I was not always there.

There is a difference. And Blink made that difference impossible to ignore.

Mia stood in the White Desert of Egypt as the sun was setting and cupped her hand over her eye. She gave herself tunnel vision — deliberately, quietly, practicing the darkness that was coming for her — and still she did not look away from the sunset. She stayed with it. She let it fill every corner of the vision she had left.

Eleven years old. Standing in a desert. Choosing to see.

I have thought about that image more than I have thought about most things that have happened to me in my actual life. Because Mia was not being brave in the way we perform bravery. She was not inspiring anyone. She was not thinking about what she was teaching the camera or the world or a writer sitting on a couch in Chennai who would one day try to find words for what she did.

She was just a girl who knew that the light was precious.

And she refused to waste a single second of it.

Years ago I wrote seven words for children I never met, in a country I have never stopped thinking about — children who were born into love and stolen by hate, who never got a bucket list or a year of sunsets or a mother explaining the world to them in a warm and patient voice.

To the Little Angels of Syria — Born out of love, but lost to hate.

I wrote those words because I believed then, as I believe now, that the smallest lives carry the largest light. That innocence is not weakness. That a child laughing in a bathtub in a bombed city is one of the most profound acts of resistance the human spirit is capable of.

Blink brought all of that back.

And it added something new.

It added Laurent — the little philosopher who closed his eyes and made peace with his darkness before he even fully understood it. It added Colin's laughter in places where most adults would only find sorrow. It added Mia's quiet, fierce, extraordinary determination to see everything while she still could.

It added a mother who said — I am not showing my daughter an elephant in a book. I am taking her to see one.

And it added a question that has been sitting in my chest ever since, the way only the truest questions do — not demanding an answer, just refusing to leave.

What are you waiting for?

Because your eyes work. Right now, as you read these words, they work. The people you love are somewhere — close or far — but somewhere. The sky outside is doing something it has never done in exactly this way before and will never do again. The child in your life, if you have one, is exactly the age they are today for exactly one day and then that version of them is gone forever. The parent who is still here is still here — today, now, in this moment that we keep treating like a rehearsal.

There is no rehearsal.

Mia knew that in a desert in Egypt.

Laurent knew that at seven years old with his eyes closed.

The Little Angels of Syria knew it without anyone having to tell them — because life, in its most brutal moments, has a way of burning away everything except what is real.

And what is real is this —

You have light. Right now, you have light. In your eyes, in your days, in the people sitting across from you at dinner who you half-listen to while your phone glows quietly in your hand.

Use it.

Not tomorrow. Not when things settle. Not when you have more time or more money or more courage or more of whatever it is you think you are currently waiting to have enough of.

Now.

See it while you can.

Because somewhere in the world tonight, a family of six is asleep after a day of living so fully it would make your ordinary Tuesday feel like a door you forgot to open.

And somewhere in the quiet of your chest, you already know — you have been standing outside that door for far too long.

Open it.

The light is on.

And it is more beautiful than you remember.

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Santhosh Sivaraj is an Author and Mind Trainer. His second book, A Story Between the Lines, is dedicated to the Little Angels of Syria. He writes about the mind, memory, and the art of being fully alive at santhoshsivaraj.com