An Everyday Effort

"You have a choice. Live or die. Every breath is a choice. Every minute is a choice. To be or not to be."
                  ~Chuck Palahniuk 

     I think that as a society we drastically undervalue the process of breathing. We take it for granted and just assume that it will happen on its own. And sure, I guess we don't really have to think about the relaxation of the diaphragm and the negative pressure gradient that causes the lungs to inflate with oxygen. But breathing--that's something different entirely. For example, the fact that I am consciously breathing right now is the result of an extraordinary effort. The fact that everyday I wake up and decide to continue breathing is an extraordinary effort. My choice to purposely breathe deeply rather than grab the nearest blunt object and smash everything around me into a million tiny pulverized pieces is in and of itself an extraordinary decision. Therefore I think that breathing has become dangerously underrated in today's world. Let's say that the entire world decided they were no longer going to breathe, they'd might as well just stop living. It's much like the subtle difference between being alive and living. While one is perfectly easy to do, the other requires risk and a certain level of uncertainty. Every time we choose to breathe, to be aware in every moment that we are living and interacting with the world around us, we choose to acknowledge the uncertainty of the world around us. It's easy to get lost in a world with billions of people all moving around you, but every breath we take is the result of a profound decision to keep on going. To keep on living. And that is exactly the point I'm trying to get at. All we have to do in life is try. Labels like "success" and "failure", and any words that try to measure our existence are all utterly insignificant because the effort it takes to really live, to really experience something, is immense and so all we need to do is try. Consciously make an effort, and even if it goes nowhere it's only important that you try. That you decided to take that breathe and wake up the next day  and even if you know you'll fail you fail a different way than you did yesterday. Just keep trying. Keep breathing. Keep on with the keepin' on.