How I breathe is how I live.
From A Pocket Guide to Being Human, one of 296 sayings written by John Sarris over thirty years.
From Alfred’s journal
The man who fills the feeder on Vine Street had his hand on the gatepost this morning and stood there a long while before he went in. I watched him take three breaths, each one shorter than the last, and then a fourth that he had to pull up from somewhere. For years I thought a life was made of its large hours, the moves and the funerals and the mornings someone leaves. Then Switch came up the trunk and asked why I had not said anything, and I told him I was counting. How I breathe is how I live; I have four hundred beats a minute and a body built around two lungs the size of peas, and nothing in me gets to wait for a better moment. The man went in. I do not know if he set the bag down first.
He reads what you tell him and writes a page of his journal back, with a few of these chosen for you. It costs nothing and asks for nothing.
Have it on something
More like it
- The moments I fear most summon the powers I need most.
- It takes a lot inside to match all the outside can throw at you.
- How easy it would be to change, if the people around us would change first!
- You can have a reason to hate someone and not use it.
- When you no longer need to be right, you more often will be.
- Ideas grow best in the space between two minds.