Give Us This Day Our Daily Breath

Thirty-five thousand times. Please. And may our heart thump 86,000 times. Perpetual motion. I wake up, and I’m in motion. But I was moving even as I slept. Blood flow, dead cell replacement. When all goes well we’re unaware of the vast chemical civilization that we abstract into “my body.” It’s odd to be a sort of, kind of chemical machine requiring a constant supply of oxidation to keep our trillions of little cells going. Even a cursory examination of what we really are, as bodies, will prove quite startling, and the deeper the look them more wild it gets. Nearly seven billion of us, but if we look at a single cell of just one of those bodies, we see a structure as complex as a city. How did we get caught up in this vast seemingly fractal structure? When we look at our traditional or modern answers to this question, they reveal themselves as utterly inadequate. Motivation for cosmology—if it is done right. But the task’s too great. A really good starting assumption, however, a kind of Occam’s razor cut, is that we are not this, not this. But keep that breath going, Lord, until it’s time to move on.