The breath is always here

I was skeptical. Sitting still and watching your breath for ten days sounds like wasted time to someone who measures productivity in commits and shipped features.

But the breath has a property that nothing else does: it is always happening, right now, without effort. You cannot think about the past breath. The concept of a future breath is fiction. The breath is the present tense, embodied.

If you are breathing, you are here. If you are here, you are already where you need to be.

The engineering parallel

There's a reason observability is the hardest part of distributed systems. You can't fix what you can't see. Meditation is observability for the mind — and like monitoring, the discipline is just in actually looking, consistently, not cleverly.