Take a deep breath in

Feel the air filling your lungs and expanding your chest

Hold it at its fullest expansion

And breathe out, removing that tension and allowing your body to rejoice in its release.

Hold yourself in this complete emptiness

And breathe in

Continuing in this conscious rhythm of depletion and excess, consumption and expulsion

Begin to feel the floor under you

The cold, frigid, unrelenting touch of its plateau  

Beneath the surface lie layers of stone, steel, and human dust

Deeper more into the crumbling earth runs not just wire and pipe,

but the bones of those who came before.

You are sitting on centuries of forgotten footsteps.

Generations built upon generations, each life a thin sediment pressed into the foundations.

Breathe out

The breath you take now began billions of years ago.

A single chest rising and falling in a city of millions.

And it will continue long after you are gone.

For above you, thousands of others will move, stacking lives with cold indifference.

Hear the pulse of humanity

The hum of electricity through the veins of concrete.

The steady respiration of ventilation shafts, the exhale of buses, the mechanical sigh of doors closing.

The buzz of a thousand voices with a thousand faces, you will never know their names, and they will never know yours.

Each sound is part of a vast circulatory system — and you, just a cell within it.

Contributing each to the cacophonous, writing endless motion of the whole.

You could disappear right now, and the rhythm would continue.

The trains would still arrive.

The traffic lights would still blink in perfect indifference.

This is not cruel.

 It is simply the scale of things.

And within that scale, you are free.

The beauty of insignificance

 is that nothing is demanded of you.

Every small creation is radiant precisely because it will vanish.

A brief flicker of awareness

 in the circuitry of eternity.