Take a deep breath. What do you notice? You probably closed your eyes right? You felt your chest expand and then, while you exhaled, you felt relaxed, at ease. Maybe you stopped talking. Or stopped eating. Or stopped typing. All to focus on the breath. A breath is like a pause, a personification of the comma in human speech.

As a runner(I know, I bring this up a lot), breathing is everything. We do countless workouts to improve our breath, to increase the amount of oxygen we can intake in a single breath, making our lungs more powerful and more efficient. As a human, breathing is everything. We all need it to survive, to provide oxygen to our body, our blood, our brain, and our muscles. As an ecosystem, breathing is everything. I was just in a jungle in Panama the other day and just like how they talk about it in the Avatar movies, you can hear, no, you can feel the jungle breathing. Each bug vibrating, parrot fighting, leaf rustling, monkey howling reminds you of the jungle’s life. The plurality of the breath showcases itself as the engine of life. Conversely, however, the singularity, the breath, is a vacuum.

I use a breath as a reset. When doing work, (ideally) I take a breath to reset myself after maybe a dense page of reading or a tricky math problem that took me a while to figure out, mainly a measure to stay off of my phone. But it can also be more than that. It helps me fall asleep, taking deep breaths to lower my heart rate and relax my body, and it can help me focus during a test, taking a deep breath before it starts to calm down or before a tricky problem to clear the mind.

Breathing is rhythm, it’s the quarter notes that dance around you. A breath is a pause, a rest in the measures. The difference in the plurality of the word is fascinating to say the least. Isolated, they are polar opposites, but both are part of the circle of life. I give breath three oxygen molecules out of three.