Choosing our breath is the secret sauce

I’m sick and have been for over a week now. Am I overreacting or being a baby about it? Maybe. But to be fair, I only get sick once every couple years and when it happens, it tends to with something that knocks me off my feet, bringing me face to face with my mortality as I meander towards the brink of death but never fully perishing into the other side. Funny how even my sickness stays on-brand with consistently staying near the edge-of-death.

Close to death as it feels, it’s surprisingly not Covid– I tested three times. Even more surprisingly, I still haven’t gotten it yet. Despite Dr. Ma Sang-Hyuk and the Korea Herald saying that anyone who hasn’t gotten Covid by now has no friends… I do in fact have friends. I simply happen to have been avoiding physical contact with them for two years while learning to really enjoy my own company for the first time ever. I’ve also just happened to have been very lucky and would like to keep it that way, but I digress.

As I sit on my couch gasping for air between coughing fits, I’m finding it ironic that literally days before getting sick, I was reading and learning all about the power of breath. James Nestor’s book Breath, dives into the mysterious and yet incredible power of breath and dives down the rabbit hole of a thought I’ve often pondered –how crazy is it that breathing is the only autonomous function that we can both intentionally control and also survive without paying any attention to it? We have no control over our heart rate, blood pressure, or brain function, but can fully harness control of our breath? That thing that separates us from death within three minutes? I don’t know about you, but to me, that’s wild.

Regardless of if you believe humans were carefully created by a higher power, that we evolved from primates, or something in between, I feel like there is something important for all of us to notice here. Our ability to choose the depth and breadth of our breaths -the thing that gives us life- is incredible. No matter if it is divinely created or evolutionarily passed down, it has to be important. Why else would we have have the ability to control this otherwise autonomous bodily function?

If breath is essential for sustaining life and we as humans have been given the miraculous ability to control our breathing, does this not point to the incredible gift of the ability to control our overall lives through sheer thought and intentionality? Choosing to breathe is the secret sauce! Yeah, wow!

As I sit and cough my way through a series of coughs that feel like there’s a heavy wet towel stuck inside my chest, I can’t help but think about how this unfortunate experience connects with the bigger picture. I think of the air we breathe, the more than two years of life that has passed for all of us while living in the Covid pandemic, how much we have all taken breathing for granted, and similarly, how much we have taken life for granted.

My sickness has made me hyper aware of the fact that I currently cannot breathe any satisfying breaths. I’m not able to speak without sounding like I am very sad, hungover, or otherwise extremely deprived of sleep, joy, and peace. Any effort of air coming out of my mouth from speaking or coughing results in more coughing shortly after, which sends me into a new cycle of gasping for air. I’m not able to go out and enjoy all the many activities and adventures I had planned for myself and the few friends I haven’t intentionally been avoiding. I’m unable to do simple things like go for a walk or even sit at my computer to get some much needed work done because it will tire me out — not being able to breathe tends to do that to a person. Throughout this week I’ve had a reoccurring internal thought that sounds like “is this what dying feels like?”. All to say, its been a joy living in silence inside my head.

While all of this is true, I am also acutely aware that the equal and opposite are also true. As much as I wonder how much my current state equates to slowly dying, I am in fact not actually dead! More importantly, the awareness of not being dead yet, seems to bear the same gravity as my previous realization of the incredible ability to breathe (see: live) mindfully. It is a gift to have the freedom to choose to breathe with intention and control, or to allow our autonomic nervous system run the show. The same is true for the freedom to choose between doing something about not being dead or just allowing myself to flounder while feeling like death is slowly riding that wet towel in my lungs inching ever closer to my bitter end. Neither is better or worse, right or wrong, good or bad. The sheer fact that we have the freedom to choose, is the only point. We choose either way, and the fact that we forget is kind of a big deal.

What do we do when we are aware of our aliveness, matters.

When I think back on this past week of my mortality being waived in front of me by this consistent cough and the inability to breathe… the things that have given me life are the people who have reached out. There is a fine line between “not dead yet” and remembering you’re still alive. The friends and family who have shown up for me have reminded me of a life worth living and a world worth recovering for. My grandma braved the transit system, on her own, for over an hour, and clocked some hefty kms to bring homemade soup to my doorstep. My mom came out of the woodwork after months of not speaking to me to text me and ask how I was doing. My dad took a detour to the “better” Asian restaurant to get me the “good” congee, and my sister helped him deliver it. Colleagues who are no longer on my team have reached out to check up on me. My friends from around the world have gone out of their way to gift me words of encouragement and wishes to get better soon. Friends locally have checked up on me again and again to see how I’m progressing and if there is anything I need, offering to drop off medicine, snacks and suggesting tried and true recipes for speedy recoveries. These connections are what tips the “not dead yet”, over into “a life worth living” and at the end of each day, they are what really matter.

We need human connection like we need to breathe. We have the option to let things run by default and let circumstances like work, taxes, doctors, landlords, cashiers and the autonomic system run our lives, or we can open ourselves to the people who reach out. Better yet, we can be the ones to reach out to others to offer them the connections that make this life worth living.

We can focus on the air we get into our lungs, as much as we focus on the air left unconsumed. We can choose when to breathe, how much to breathe, how deeply to breathe, and when and where we hold our breath. We inhale and exhale because we’re designed to be in balance. To give and to take. To dance between the awareness of “not being dead yet” and the choice to fully live a “life worth living”.

It is this slight shift in mindset that is the secret sauce of mastering our humanity. The infinite space between what is not possible and what is worth trying to create. Life is breath, and we were designed with the option to choose to breathe.