Everything is temporary, and someday you will die.
Do I have your attention? Cool.

The ability to manufacture and store ice completely changed the culinary world, and the cocktail couldn’t exist without it. When you add ice to a drink, the cooling process begins immediately. The chilled surface of an ice cube cools the liquid around it, and more surface area means quicker cooling. If you want to cool a drink very quickly, a large quantity of small ice chips will get the job done fastest. Unfortunately, there’s a tradeoff: more surface area also means quicker melting, and melting means watering down a drink. This process occurs so quickly that many cocktail bars will not serve a beverage if a bartender takes longer than two minutes to make and serve it to a customer. This two-minute cutoff marks the time when dilution has set in or, in the language of the industry, when the drink “start to die.”

There’s a lot of science in the type of ice you choose. Perhaps you’ve been served a drink that had a sphere of ice instead of the more traditional cube. Mathematically, a sphere has the lowest possible surface area to the maximum volume; because it has no corners or edges, it will melt more slowly than an ice cube. While using ice spheres will slow dilution, it doesn’t stop it entirely. To avoid dilution almost completely, many drink recipes involve stirring or shaking ingredients with ice to cool them and then immediately straining the ice out. Martinis, sazeracs, daiquiris, and a slew of other drinks require this technique.

It seems, while ice makes cocktails possible, it also ruins them when left to sit even a moment too long. With drinks dying in a matter of minutes, cocktails are a highly transitory form of art.

So it goes with humanity. Our lives are beautiful but temporary. People are masterpieces meant to be appreciated in the moment, but ever changing and one day gone. Our temporary nature doesn’t detract from our remarkableness though; if anything, it enhances it. Life is made all the more precious by its fleeting nature, and as we inevitably melt, we savor the tastes and experiences around us, celebrating and appreciating the limited time we have in this world, having hopefully made it better by our presence here.

So, the next time you sit down with any kind of iced beverage, look at the slowly melting frozen water and reflect:
We are impermanent.
We are beautiful.
We are ice.