While We Still Have Time moves between a meditation hall in Sri Lanka and the Indian Ocean, between Hà Nội traffic and the Kazakh mountains, between the grammar of Vietnamese and the weight of Hungarian, and asks what remains when everything familiar falls away.
Csilla Phan writes philosophy from the inside out. In seventeen essays, she traces what it means to live as a self that belongs fully to nowhere and is therefore free: the ten days of Vipassana silence that made impermanence a physical fact rather than a borrowed concept; the eldest daughter's particular accounting of herself before she even walks through the door; the moment a childhood bully sets up a board and the only winning move is not to play; the clarity that arrives only in motion, in the in-between hours when nothing asks for performance.
Philosophy earned through the body.
Born in Hungary, carrying Vietnamese blood, writing in the language the world reads in: Phan occupies the intersection of three cultures without belonging completely to any of them. That position is the book's method as much as its subject. Normal is plural. Home is fluid. The self keeps arriving somewhere new and calling it home.
While We Still Have Time is for readers who want philosophy that has passed through difficulty and come out the other side still soft. For anyone who has felt the distance between knowing something and feeling it in the body. For the eldest daughters. For the people on bikes. For everyone who suspects that the safe life, the careful life, might be costing them something they cannot yet name.