When Breathing Becomes a Luxury

I live in a city where the air is often thick with warnings. The numbers on the AQI board flicker between Very Unhealthy and Hazardous, but life continues, cars move, buildings rise, and conversations drift from the weather to what’s next. On some mornings, sunlight struggles to break through the haze. Still, no one really stops.

It’s a strange thing, how we learn to adapt to discomfort. How we begin to accept things that once would’ve felt alarming? The unusual becomes routine. We go about our days, pausing only when the breath feels heavier or the throat burns. And even then, we carry on.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what this pace is doing to us, not just physically, but emotionally. There’s constant construction outside, but often a quiet collapse inside. And amongst all this chaos, it’s heartbreaking to witness developers, in the name of progress, cutting down what little remains of our green belts. Trees fall, forests shrink, and yet the silence continues. Somewhere between the traffic, the deadlines, and the cement dust, I sense a kind of forgetting. A forgetting of slowness. Of connection. Of what it feels like to be in tune with nature, with others, and even with ourselves.

And maybe that’s what unsettles me the most. Not just the disappearing green spaces, but the emotional distance we’ve created from the world around us. The way we’ve learned to go numb to noise, to change, to loss.

Sometimes, I imagine a future where clean air is a luxury. Where children grow up never knowing what it feels like to walk through a forest, or taste fruit straight from a tree. Where a simple moment of silence under a real sky feels like a gift, not a given.

But this isn’t just about the environment. It’s about something deeper, something within. We’re not only running out of breathable air. Many of us are running out of emotional space. We’re carrying too much, rushing through too much, forgetting to pause just to be.

And somewhere beneath the smog, there’s a quiet longing. A longing to return to something simple. Something real.

We may not be able to fix everything around us. But we can choose what we carry within. In a world of rush and ruin, choosing stillness is an act of remembering who we are, what we need, and what we’ve lost.

And perhaps that remembering… is the beginning of coming home.