We inhale and exhale about 20,000 times a day. Each time, we set a remarkably complex chain of events in motion. A slew of muscles you don’t even know you have activate to expand your lungs. Oxygen passes from your lunges to your blood to your heart to be ferried throughout your body. That life-giving oxygen is exchanged for carbon dioxide, a toxic waste product, which is expelled as you exhale. Over and over. Breathing in life-giving oxygen. Breathing out toxic carbon dioxide.
Despite its essential role in our survival, despite the magic, the science and the complexity, inhaling and exhaling go largely unnoticed. Unobserved. Ignored.