I wanted to write about life itself but I didn’t feel I had the authority. I started anyway, scribbling some words in the pocket notebook, as though a poem in a haphazard sort of way :

from the very air
we exist
inhalation forming
and reforming, exhaled
to the very air
we exist

It’s a difficult subject and I’m not a poet so that’s about as far as I got. The words form the correct narrative, more or less, but it reads terribly. Stilted and odd.

The desire to convey a sort of visual or experiential simile for existence sticks with me though, so I’m going to try it again without the requirements for poetry, or for anything else :

A life can be imagined as a breath. A lifetime’s experience of consciousness and awareness is a reaction, as though a reaction by the air itself to the very act of being formed, existing, and being unformed as a single breath. A life or breath is made individual through this process of being pulled from the vastness of it all.

Finally and always exhaled, there is no ending or death to speak of only the merging and rejoining of the individual back into the air and into life itself.

Just like the breath, your life and mine have a beginning and an end and a transforming, ever-forward, unique and individual experience in-between these two absolutes.

Just like the breath, we are from the vastness of life itself and to that vastness we will eventually return.

And just like the breath, in the here and the now our only requirement is to be.

A single breath has many characteristics, some desirable and some sometimes not, but every breath need only to be a breath to be a precious and wonderful thing.

Just like life. Simply to be here not only enough, it’s the entire answer.