It was said long ago that life is but a breath.
One moment we are drawn into it; the next, it thins, loosens, and is gone.
I once believed that if I inhaled more deeply—if I held the breath before releasing it—the moment might widen. That time itself might pause, suspended inside the chest. Instead, the opposite occurred. Holding the breath sharpened the hunger for the next one. The longer it was kept, the more insistent the body became. What I hoped would extend the moment only made its ending press closer.
So it seems with life.
It moves too quickly to be understood from within it. We arrive, we act, we release—often before the shape of what we have done can be seen. Meaning feels present, but always just beyond reach, like a memory forming as it passes. I wondered whether anything of lasting weight could truly be placed inside such a narrow span. Whether a thing could matter if it existed only between an inhale and an exhale.
We set things into the world as one might place a seed into the ground. Not thrown. Not careless. Set—just beneath the surface, where the soil still holds warmth. And then we are gone. We do not remain to see whether it is watered or neglected, protected or crushed. We do not hear the moment it breaks open. Even the most careful tending must eventually be surrendered, left to weather and chance, to hands we will never meet.
It is not that the seed will not grow.
It is that our breath does not last long enough to know.
No measure of effort resolves this. No depth of care removes the uncertainty. Our briefness denies us the outcome. The question is not whether what we place has meaning, but how such meaning could ever be seen within a life that moves so quickly from drawing in to letting go.
Only one understanding allowed the breath to settle.
If life ends where the breath leaves the body, then meaning remains unfinished—always assumed, never witnessed. But if existence does not end with that release, if the pattern continues beyond what we call death, then sight is not confined to this span. Then the seed is not abandoned. Then the tending, brief as it was, is not lost to silence.
There may come a moment—elsewhere, later—when the inhale and the exhale can be held together. When what passed between them can be seen not as fragments, but as part of a longer remembering. A thread carried forward. A placement made in listening rather than certainty.
In that light, the shortness of life no longer empties it of meaning. It reveals its place. Each breath offered not to completion, but to continuity—joining other breaths, other lives, into a pattern no single span could contain.
And so the breath is taken.
And so it is released.
Not because the moment was enough on its own,
but because it belonged to something still unfolding.
© 2025 Steven Scott. All Rights Reserved.
Unauthorized use or reproduction of this material is prohibited without written permission.