Breaking Points

By Hera Barrameda

One of the most important epiphanies I had in recent years is that the biggest lessons come from the smallest of things. These are lessons hiding in plain sight as seemingly unimportant trivial experiences. And these lessons, for most of life, will remain to be small, until we wake up to the reality that they are big after all.

COVID-19 made me realize how important the breath is and how for most of our lives we failed to acknowledge its significance. When I look back at the times I have been grateful for life, I attribute it to many things: my family, my friends, my education, my career, and decisions that made me smile. It wasn’t until this pandemic that I realized how so many lives depended on this singular event called the breath and I wondered if there are people who felt this way too. We have been so busy thanking everything outside of us but failed to give credit to this technological marvel that is our body.

While in a global conference years ago, I saw how exponential technologies are celebrated: 3D printers that can recreate human organs, human expeditions to Mars, technologies that can mimic the human brain, and robots programmed to live like us. Living in a generation that allowed me to witness this, I often tell myself it’s a wonderful time to be alive. However, there are times important questions cross my mind:

Why are we so fascinated with migrating to an already dead planet, when ours is still very much alive?

Why are we so obsessed with making machines smarter than humans, while subjecting humans to an education that only dumbs us down?

Why are we telling people to live from the mind, on a planet that would love for us to be so deeply connected to our hearts?

While I am grateful to be born at a period we are considerably at our smartest. I am also seeing how we have been so distracted by the rules society has set for us that we have forgotten who we truly are.

Breaking points hit us so we can be pushed to take a break. Most of the time we say we’re taking a break so we can find ourselves again, until we realize that there is no need to look elsewhere but inside of us, for we were never really lost and only needed to remember who we are.

I was having my morning pancake one Sunday morning when I saw two toddlers playing in the park. They were freely running around with their nervous nannies behind them, carefully making sure they don’t come home with a single scratch. I looked at those little people gleam like every day is a day in the park and eventually see them hug each other while saying the most pleasant greeting I’ve heard in a long time: “I love you, you love me, let’s hug” and without hesitation they both did. That day, I wondered about whether I had that kind of innocent kinship too – the kind that’s open and honest, yet safe and sure. I wondered how many of us forget how life was so much simpler. I wondered, too, if we will ever remember when things started to change for each of us (and for what reasons). I thought if we could, maybe we can stop wandering and come home to how things were: A world where we can love without limits, play like that day in the park, and run freely and without fear.

We always say life is all about the little things. We say that so much to the point that we have forgotten what it’s here to teach us. Then we set out to chase the big things because we were taught that bigger is better or it’s either we go big or go home. Bound for burnout, our fuse breaks at some point and we cry at the realization that it’s the little things that truly matter. And while it’s true that it’s a core shaking realization, we did not cry because we found our new self, we cried because we remembered.

I was watching a video on Youtube when I chanced upon this talk by a famous teacher who said something like this: When an egg breaks open from the outside something dies. But when it breaks from the inside a new life is born.

How do you wish to break?