Borrowed Breaths

there are moments when I pause,

not because I choose to,

but because something deeper within me stops moving,

and whispers a truth I’m not ready to hold.

a truth so simple,

that I keep running from it, that i keep shying away from,

and the truth is:

i am living on borrowed breaths.

not mine, never mine,

just given to me for a while, for a purpose,

like a traveler handed a lantern to walk through a night,

that doesn’t belong to him.

each inhale is a permission,

each exhale is a reminder,

and in between them,

there is a debt I forget I owe.

i don’t know who lends them to me,

the universe, the nature,

the unseen laws, the karma,

or the part of me that exists beyond memory,

but I know this much,

i did not create a single breath I take,

i only receive them,

use them,

spend them,

waste them,

love through them,

hurt through them,

and eventually return them.

sometimes I wonder,

if before I arrived here,

i signed a pact I can no longer recall,

agreeing to come back,

agreeing to finish what was left incomplete,

agreeing to learn what I once avoided.

maybe I chose this life, this body,

the way a soul chooses a doorway,

knowing what it must walk through,

but not knowing how hard the steps will feel.

and yet,

the moment I entered this life,

the memory of that choice dissolved,

completely,

like a dream lost before morning,

borrowed consciously, forgotten instantly,

lived unconsciously, repeated endlessly.

perhaps the interest on this loan,

is paid in the form of suffering,

not as punishment, but as a nudge,

a reminder, a gentle insistence:

wake up. wake up. remember!

breaths are not given forever,

they are lent,

and when we refuse to learn,

they are extended again,

another chance, another life, another cycle,

until the awareness that once existed before birth,

returns after enough forgetting.

maybe enlightenment is nothing more,

than realizing,

we can no longer afford to live unconsciously,

maybe liberation begins,

when a single breath is taken,

not as a right,

but as a gift.

i don’t know if I will ever remember,

why these breaths were entrusted to me,

but I want to live in a way,

that honors their giver,

even if I never know their presence, their name.

for now,

all I can do is breathe,

with a little more awareness,

a little more humility, a little more wonder,

knowing each breath I take,

is both a lesson, and a promise,

waiting to be fulfilled. As Rumi, the great mystic said once, "there is one way of breathing that is shameful and constricted. Then, there’s another way: a breath of love that takes you all the way to infinity.", may my borrowed breaths become that, breaths of love, breaths that return what was entrusted to me.

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© 2025 Beyond Silence.