It began, quietly, with a breath.
The Lie We Live By
Most of us live like time is out to get us.
We race the clock. Chase deadlines. Fill calendars. Count minutes like coins we’ll run out of.
We say things like “I need more time” or “There’s just not enough of it,” as if time is some cruel external force we’re sentenced to serve under. But what if that’s not how time works at all?
What if time isn’t a line we run along — but a current we’re meant to move with?
And what if the secret to moving with it… was breath?
I didn’t come to that realization all at once.
And I didn’t come to it in stillness or silence.
I came to it while lying under a needle, in pain, during a blackout tattoo session — my body in surrender, my breath in sync, and my mind quietly writing.
Not on paper. But inside.
This essay didn’t begin on a page. It began in the body.
The Needle and the Moment
The artist was at hour 21 of a 24-hour marathon.
I was just one of many clients on his schedule — in for two hours of blackout ink.
By minute 105, I expected to be counting down. Waiting for it to end. But I wasn’t.
I was lying still. Not numb. Not detached.
Fully there — not because I fought the pain, but because I breathed through it.
Each inhale welcomed the needle.
Each exhale softened its sting.
And slowly, my mind began to settle into rhythm — not just with the pain, but with time itself.
I wasn’t checking the clock.
I wasn’t watching the session pass.
I was inside it.
Time didn’t stop. It just… dissolved.
The seconds no longer asked for attention. They were simply part of breath.
And somewhere in that sensation, the words started forming in my head — quiet, steady, whole:
This is how we move through time.
Not by outrunning it.
But by breathing into it.
Breath as a Clock
That wasn’t the first time I had touched this state — but it was the first time I saw it clearly.
For years, I’d felt this subtle truth in moments of grief, during meditation, in conversations that asked for stillness.
And I’d felt the opposite, too — the kind of time that races when we’re anxious, that collapses when we panic, that disappears when we’re numb.
What I hadn’t realized, until this moment, was that breath was the difference.
I began noticing how often I wasn’t really breathing:
- Holding my breath through tension.
- Rushing it through discomfort.
- Forgetting it entirely in busyness.
And when I did breathe — fully, deeply, intentionally — time changed. Not the world’s clock, but mine.
I later found what so many ancient traditions already knew:
- In yoga, breath (prana) is life force.
- In meditation, breath is the anchor to awareness.
- In trauma healing, breath is how the body learns safety again.
Breath isn’t just a function.
It’s our internal timekeeper.
When we follow it, we find presence.
And in presence, time stops ruling us.
Presence Is Power
Breath doesn’t let us control time.
But it teaches us how to meet it.
When breath leads, we stop rushing.
We stop fleeing.
We stop bracing.
Time stops being something to survive. It becomes something we inhabit.
That’s what makes it feel like time is being manipulated — not because it changes, but because we finally arrive in it.
This truth deepened for me after my brainstem glioma diagnosis.
It’s one thing to think about time.
It’s another to feel it pressing in — finite, embodied, real.
Illness changed my relationship with time, but breath changed my relationship with living inside it.
Since then, breath has meant something else entirely:
Not just presence, but permission.
To be here.
To feel everything.
To not rush what matters.
To not miss what’s real.
Time Isn’t the Enemy
I used to think time was the problem.
Now I know — it was the absence of breath.
That tattoo session didn’t give me a new idea.
It let a long-held truth take form.
It offered pain as teacher, breath as compass, and presence as passage.
Breath didn’t just get me through.
It gave me back to myself.
And in that return, time changed shape.
We don’t need to master time.
We need to learn how to arrive inside it — with breath, with rhythm, with attention.
That’s how I learned to manipulate time.
Not by controlling it.
But by choosing how I meet it.
And now, each time I forget, I return to the first step:
One inhale.
One exhale.
One moment — fully lived.
Next time the world rushes you, try this: one inhale, one exhale. Time will wait.