Because breathing is essential for life, it touches every part of our existence. What does it mean to you to breathe? When was the last time you really noticed your breath? What were you doing? Was there ever a time when you realized you had taken your breath for granted?
It is no revelation, the debate between me and my lungs. When life decided to have me in the world I emerged toes first, upside down–– from the onset gravity decided to make oxygen quite valuable. The memory of tracing the scar on my mother's lower abdomen is as blurry as the impact asthma had on me in my childhood, although I seem to have a natural inclination towards the taste and exhaust of an inhaler, being I suppose, especially fresh, particularly relieving, even life-giving.
The condition magically disappeared, and I was able to live asthma-free. That said I always have an inkling that the frame of the ribcage, the muscles about the heart, and the susceptibility of the lungs to the essential respiratory element was defective from the start and always will be. I still can't breathe fully, sometimes just to feel like I'm getting remotely enough air I grind my molars together and strain my sternum upward. Sometimes it's true; that this is a result of poor posture and bad habits. Other times, those are only supposable aggravations to the fundamentally flawed system.
Such difficulty is often alleviated by a run or a deep yoga practice. I began properly loving running since about 13 or 14 years old, about a year into the slew of teenage pressure on appearance, and as I met Sidney whom I ran with every weekend. As the secondary school workload got tough and body image ideals persisted, I ran more to alleviate the stress. I ran rounds around my school in the early mornings, loved the blue tone cast by the rising sun, and the wind of dawn chilliness through my hair and into my nostrils. When I run, there is less the perception of breathing being hard because well, breathing does get hard. To heave and puff are uncomfortable yes, sometimes dreadful, but that often clears my pathways, is finally enough aggression for the air to be pushed through my lungs.
As for yoga, I'd only recently started practicing regularly and intentionally. Instead of spurring my body forward in bursts, yoga opens me up; sends my muscles reaching outwards before quivering and delivering an exhale, forces the blood to travel to the tippy points of the parts I rarely reach for and with that coaxes my heart to pump a little harder, smoother, with the caress like that of human hands around a newly born kitten.
As the world struggles against a terrifying threat towards that which we thought was our own, embedded in some biological right to the individual, I pray that they receive the respite that I feel when I can expel so deep an exhale I feel the weight lifted off my temples. I pray that they'd trust their heart, their lungs, their ribcage, their muscles, and all the tiny networks of lifelines that course through the flesh. I pray that they'd emerge, even if feet first, and that when they walk out of the doors of that terror they'd still remember the tightness around their chest and with me, sigh at the privilege of being able to breathe.
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