My work office is tinged with the orange glow of a cold, Autumn sunrise. The ambient rock of Explosions in the Sky blared through my iPhone speakers as I worked my way through video editing.
I exhale.
It’s hard to even fathom how rare that stillness is. I can focus again. For a an hour that feels more like eight, I can finally focus on a singular task. The phone is silent. No one walks the school halls. My office is a lake at sunrise, smooth, quiet and waiting for the rest of the day’s activity.
I take a deep breath in. I let my lungs fill up to their fullest. My chest expands, pushing the buttons of my polo shirt open.
I exhale. Slow. Deliberate. For a moment, I can connect this exhale through every other time I’ve felt this still, like a portal through time connected by one, intentional breath.
I’m at the top of a mountain in the warm, Arizona sunshine. I exhale. Sitting on the sand-colored rocks, I’m surrounded by people who also made the trek up Camelback Mountain’s arduous terrain, but as the breeze rips through my white, sleeveless shirt, I’m alone.
The autumn chill flows through my hair and sends a shiver across my teary eyes. I exhale. Mourners flow in and out past my aunt’s grave. Others quietly weep or share their condolences with my cousins. Their sounds are the only ones you can hear in the quiet cemetery, but I can’t hear them.
Wet, misty rain mixes with the sweat in my mud-covered rugby jersey to create a cold, heavy weight on my shoulders. Through sore lungs, I exhale. Shouts from the ongoing tournament cut through the rainy, May afternoon, but they just become white noise. I sit on the ground in the middle of a thick, grassy field. Teammates come by to dap me up or bro-hug it out, but in that moment, I’m alone.
“God is in the Exhale.”
Don Draper, the main character in Mad Men, once tells a potential client not to settle with the work their current agency is doing because, “what is happiness? It’s a moment before you need more happiness.”
I believe peace - both in the world and true inner peace - follows a similar path. What is peace? A moment. Finding peace isn’t an action with a finish line or a completion date, it’s an everlasting project that needs to be developed, refined, and sought after.
No one is truly ever at peace because peace only lasts so long. And that’s OK. How can you appreciate having something if you always have it? Happiness is nothing without struggle. Wealth doesn’t feel the same without poverty. Reaching a destination is empty without the journey along the way.
I exhale.
Our body exhales about 22,000 times per day. A breath in gives us our fuel, oxygen, but it also gives us other gasses. Some, in excess, can kill. It’s the exhale that expels them.
There’s something about that slow, deliberate exhale. When you inhale, you take in the world around you. You breathe in all of it’s good and all of it’s bad. You can’t have one without the other.
You have the good, but it doesn’t connect as well surrounded by the bad. God is in every breath, but the connection is fuzzy when intertwined with the demons. Expel the bad. Leave the good. Find solace in that moment.
“God is in the Exhale”
Inspiration taken from a Noel Blackmire poem.
Great writing!