Treat others kindly, because they will breathe the air you've exhaled, and make their bodies from the atoms that have left you.

The carbon in our bones once belonged to a star, and before that to nothing we can name. Every exhale releases atoms that will, within hours, settle into the soft tissue of strangers a continent away. Kindness is not a virtue we impose on a separate world; it is the way an organism handles the parts of itself that wear different faces. Cruelty, by the same logic, is the immune system attacking its own cells. When we soften our edges, we are not being generous so much as recognizing the loop we were already inside. What part of us, today, is already becoming someone else?