The Watch Told Me to Breathe. I Didn't. It Told Me Again

Every hour, the watch reminds me to breathe. I have ignored it 4,000 times. It has never once been discouraged. I have started to admire its commitment to my wellbeing, which exceeds my own.

The reminder is a gentle vibration and a little animation of a circle expanding and contracting. Breathe, it says, in effect. Take a moment. It is the most patient thing in my life. It has asked me to breathe 4,000 times, and I have breathed on maybe forty of them, and it has never once changed its tone, never once said you never listen, never once given up.

My wife gives up. My doctor gives up. My friends have learned to stop asking. The watch does not stop. It is the only thing in my life that believes in my capacity for self-care more than I do, and I have started to feel a strange loyalty to it, the loyalty you feel toward the one person who never stopped believing in you.

The irony is thick enough to cut. I am ignoring the advice of a machine that is trying to keep me alive, while taking seriously the advice of the same machine about which milk to buy. The watch knows my heart rate. It knows when my stress spikes, because it measures the spikes, and it waits a polite interval, and then it buzzes, and it asks me to breathe, and I do not, and it does not hold it against me.

Last week I finally did it. The circle expanded, and I breathed with it, four seconds in, four seconds out, in the middle of a Tuesday that was trying to kill me. It was the first time I had breathed on purpose in months. The watch logged the moment. It gave me a small celebration animation, confetti, which was absurd, and which made me laugh, and which was the first laugh of my week.

I have started doing it more. Not because the watch is right, though it is, but because I have begun to understand that the watch's patience is a mirror, and the mirror shows me what I look like to something that wants me to be okay. It has asked 4,000 times. I have answered forty. It will ask again in an hour, and I will try to answer, and it will not know the difference, and neither, increasingly, will I.