Shallow breaths.
The deeper I breathe, the more aware I become of the shallowness of my ordinary breath.
I am constantly running on too little oxygen. I have made myself into an anxiety-ridden machine, always shuffling from thing to thing, always moving from thought to thought, worry to worry, meal to meal, assignment to assignment. My cells tremble with the need for a profound inhale.
The deeper I breathe, the more aware I become of my need for the depths.
How often do I give my lungs the air they’re fit to be filled with?
It takes the deep ones, the eight-second inhales, to break apart the knot in your chest. It takes a longer moment to slog through the mess of what’s inside. It takes a step into vulnerability to stop the dehumanizing the world would like to do of you.
I am convicted of a great brokenness that the whole of humanity feels somewhere deep inside of themselves. Being alive is terrifying. There is so much we don’t understand. The confusion and fear crawls out with fangs, in the dead of night, in the chaos we’re caught in during the hectic moments— the times where existence doesn’t make any sense and why are we here and why am I doing this?
I think we have to be honest with ourselves that all of us get scared of being alive sometimes. Existence is scary. There’s so much we don’t know. I love Christ deeply, but I hope people know that even with the hope and assurance I have in faith, I get scared too. Life is not a thing to be made sense of, even with what we do know.
In these moments I pray, I breathe. Breath is such a beautiful thing. How miraculous is it that your lungs were made in a way that can calm your entire being in seconds, flat? How miraculous is it that every time you are steeping in your fear and failure, you get out eventually?
You’re here.
You are resilient. You can breathe. You can take breaths that sustain and regenerate you.
It is about going beneath the surface-level of yourself. It is truly a disservice to yourself to skate upon the periphery of who you are and what you’re going through.
Take a deeper breath today. Fall deep into your humanity today. Acknowledge that existence is scary, and let that fear and confusion take you to a place of deeper questioning and emotion and spirituality.
We, as part of creation, come from the deep. In Hebrew, from Genesis, that’s tĕhowm, the deep, the abyss, the waters. Returning to the deep, to the depths of who you are as a human, requires knowing who you are and where you come from. That seems daunting.
I take a deep breath and breathe in the knowledge that existence is far more than the eye can see.
And then I go in pursuit of answers, knowing full well they will never be completely answered in this lifetime.
