If you thought focusing on your breath to the count of ten was hard, consider the roughly 770,000 breaths you have left from Thanksgiving Day until the end of the millennium.
A person breathes on average 15 times a minute, 900 times in an hour, 21,600 times a day—that’s 151,200 breaths drawn in a week.
Here’s how many breaths you can expect to take depending on what you’re doing:
If you practice meditation all week, or somehow manage to stay relaxed by other means, you may take only about 100,800 breaths – reducing your respiration by one-third. A week spent in deepest kath-breathing samadhi might require only 60,000 breaths. On the other hand, if you ran a weeklong marathon or took the Kama Sutra to heart (just ask Sting), expect to reach 200,000 breaths in a week, provided you’re still kicking.
So when you watch the ball drop and hear the popping corks, breathe your last breath of this millennium, and then, in the new millennium, keep breathing.