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Taking a deep breath is one of the most simple ways to connect with our own bodies,

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But taking a deep breath was not something that was possible on this earth three billion years ago.

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Before the ozone layer existed, earth was not really[br]able to sustain complex, multicellular life.

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The composition of the atmosphere of the earth[br]had almost no oxygen at all.

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We actually had a huge amount of carbon dioxide.

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And the net effect was a almost (un)inhabitable planet.

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The only organisms that could exist that time[br]were single-celled organisms.

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Luckily for us, one of those organisms that was alive[br]at this time was something called a cyanobacteria.

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And this organism has the special trick that[br]we call “photosynthesis,”

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the ability to go take energy from the sun and transform carbon dioxide into oxygen.

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And over the course of billions of years,[br]little by little these bacteria spread across the planet

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and converted all that carbon dioxide[br]in the air into the oxygen that we now have.

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And it was a very slow process. First, they[br]had to saturate the seas,

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then they had to saturate the oxygen that the earth would absorb,

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and only then, finally, could oxygen begin to build up in the atmosphere.

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And about 600 million years ago, something really amazing happens.

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The ozone layer forms from the oxygen that has been released in the atmosphere.

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And shortly after the ozone layer came into place, the earth was able to sustain complex, multi-cellular life.

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There was a Cambrian explosion of life in the seas.

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And the first plants got onto land.

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In fact, there was actually no life on land ahead of that.

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Nothing that you are familiar[br]with today could exist without the contributions

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of these tiny organisms over those billions[br]of years.

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Imagine you were one of these little organisms two billion years ago.

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You might be born.

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You live a couple weeks.

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You die.

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And you kind of feel like, well, nothing really changed.

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I mean, I had no purpose in this life. The world I came to is exactly the same as the world that I left.

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But what you wouldn’t[br]have understood is that every breath

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that you took contributed to the possibility of countless lives after you –

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lives that you would never see,

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lives that we are all a part of today.

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And it’s worth thinking that maybe the meaning of our lives

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are actually not even within the scope of our understanding.

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Because it’s[br]true of every one of these organisms,

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and it may also be true of us.

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And if it’s a possible thing for cyanobacteria to completely transform

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the physical environment[br]of our planet,

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it is absolutely a possible thing for us to do the same thing.

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We’ve been given this amazing gift of consciousness.

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And because of this gift, we have the ability[br]to deeply understand our connectedness.

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And because we can deeply understand our connectedness,

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we’re the ones that have the decision on how we’re going to go use that knowledge

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to build our societies and to shape our lives.