Breathe with me. I've been thinking about breathing. It's probably the single most important

collective function of all the various parts and systems that make you up do together.

Replace the oxygen, get rid of the carbon dioxide, you, we, I, at any point minutes away from certain death.

Pretty big fan of this air stuff myself.

And I've been thinking about consciousness, as it relates to breathing,

the crowning achievement of humankind consciousness,

the power player of the body, the most important component of the whole system,

what makes us humans, human makes me me specifically that i am really

really really smart which is already a funny picture i'm using consciousness to think about consciousness in what I

imagine it must have felt like to be one of the beautiful people in adolescence, just staring

at yourself, blown away with how pretty you are. And my consciousness is doing that, staring at

itself, so proud, pondering the big stuff, and then I take a nice big breath

of air, a conscious breath of air. And it hits me. This whole time, I've been using my conscious

mind to marvel and navel gaze at myself. The other systems, meanwhile, the unconscious parts of the brain, the nervous system,

the respiratory system, the hormonal system, digestive system have all quietly and humbly, you know,

keeping me alive. While I was thinking these oh so important thoughts, I didn't even have to

think about breathing. I was just breathing in the

background. You know when something shifts, creates a crack just big enough for you to see something

different? Well, I got it. And I saw it. My glorious, all-powerful, magnificent mind was not even

trusted with keeping myself alive.

Now in school, it was just casually explained that the mind had better things to do

than to worry about breathing. Yeah, right. Consciousness, right? Think of all the important things

...