This morning started badly. I had another terrible night, woke up exhausted, threw up, and my whole body felt tense and painful. Normally I go for a walk in the morning, but today I kept postponing it. At one point I genuinely thought: I can’t do this today. I just want to stay on the sofa and sleep.

Then I made a very small deal with myself. Get up. Have a shower. Get dressed. Go for a walk. And when you come back, order that takeaway pizza you saw yesterday. Nothing profound. No great lesson in self-discipline. Apparently pizza can occasionally be a perfectly legitimate motivational strategy.

So I got ready and left the house.

I tried calling my brother because he often keeps me company while I walk, and lately I’ve felt a little scared walking alone. He didn’t answer. For a moment I didn’t know what to do with myself, and then I thought: okay. Spotify. Put on the music you love and just walk.

And something started changing.

Songs came on that I hadn’t listened to in years. I could already feel my mood slowly shifting, almost without noticing it. Then Teardrop by Massive Attack started playing.

There is something about that song that has always felt hypnotic to me. The rhythm, the repetition, the voice, the way everything seems to move in circles. I was walking and listening when a particular line appeared on the screen.

Fearless on my breath.

And for some reason, at that exact moment, it hit me.

I closed my eyes for a second and breathed in deeply, almost instinctively, the way you do during meditation. Then I breathed out. Slowly. Completely. And I had this strange sensation that I was breathing something out of my body that had been trapped there for days. Fear, tension, exhaustion, anger, all that horrible energy I couldn’t find anywhere to put.

Obviously it didn’t magically disappear. My life didn’t suddenly become easier because a Massive Attack song came on Spotify. But for a few seconds, something opened.

It was cathartic.

I’ve always been fascinated by those tiny moments in life. They can’t really be planned and you can’t force them to happen. Sometimes it’s a conversation. Sometimes it’s a place, a smell, a sentence in a book. And sometimes you’re simply walking down the street on a shitty morning, listening to a song you’ve heard countless times before, and suddenly one line reaches you differently because you are different when you hear it.

Maybe that’s one of the reasons music has always mattered so much to me. It doesn’t necessarily change what is happening around you. Sometimes it changes the way you inhabit that moment. It gives an emotion somewhere to go.

This morning I left home because I bribed myself with pizza.

Somewhere along the walk, without looking for it, I found a breath.

And today, that was enough.