Pragmatic

Breathe in:

            Being a kid and pushing myself to swim across the high school pool, all the way, underwater, without a leap from the platform as a head start. Near the flag line, feeling desperate. Coming to the end, when I could just make out the lines on the edge, when, if I wanted, I could suck in and let the water have me with hardly any effort. To come up then and take the biggest heaving breath and have it not feel like enough. To know I could come to the brim of suffocation and not do it. Knowing that I wouldn’t truly be able to, that my body would stop me if I really did try. It all amazed me.

            Just as some people can’t do cartwheels, I, at one point, couldn’t breathe. Not in a desperate or asthmatic sense. Never gaspy. A person with a tapeworm might never feel sated, though they eat; I was never full of breath, even while forcing a yawn. While sighing while working. While sucking in breaths and holding them, willing the air to nourish, taking in more than I let out, until the overflow of oxygen turned me lightheaded. Still, I never felt full. 

            This is an obvious medical concern, you’d think. But if I was breathing, I was alive. I was fine, never passed out, no wheezing. I could still exercise.

            Then it wasn’t fine anymore. I’d stand in the middle of my studio apartment, huffing, panicking for air. I convinced myself I’d been doing something wrong, not that something was wrong.

            Instructions for deep breathing in books and on websites invariably amount to “take in a big breath.” Meditate. Focus. Expand your chest.

            How do you breathe deeply?

            You just do.

            Eventually and coincidentally, I mentioned my brimming breathlessness to a physician, who cited the cause as stress. “Relax!” she said, as if I just hadn’t considered it before. She placed her hand on my back. “Let your shoulders go loose. You’re so tense.”

            Muscles are supposed to tense, contract. It’s how we stay upright while sitting, how we lift a coffee mug. The process, typically, is unconscious: who thinks about their muscles, their bones, their body unless instructed?

            You can decide to relax. Meditate, breathe, picture the tension floating away, go joint by joint until you’ve released a mystical weight from over each of them. Focus on something beside yourself, focus on yourself, massage yourself. Take a break. Try acupuncture. Try yoga.

            I have always been flexible, splits-and-handsprings flexible. In identical mirrored fitness studios, each of the instructors said to suck in my stomach, holding my core tight and engaged, while somehow also allowing air to sink deep into my belly. It didn’t make sense. I was unfit for breathing. It was anxiety or my temperament or faulty physiology. I tried barely-conscious morning yoga. I tried after-work pre-dinner yoga. Yoga in specifically-designed yoga pants with a calming woman from the west coast who said “fo-werd” instead of “for-werd” in my living room with a mat that didn’t stay steady on my carpet video yoga. It was always a competition. I would hold poses longer than my comrades. I would force my palms flat on the floor next to the woman who could hardly touch her calves. I fast forwarded through the parts I knew already. It was not relaxing. This was no way to be breathing.

            Psychologists encouraged breathing practice, suggested brewing a cup of tea and holding it close in my hands, focusing on its heat, breathing in the warm and fragrant steam. I’ve heard warm hands encourage warm greetings and feelings during handshakes. I hate handshakes—much prefer the bow. But I already knew how to breathe; I’d been practicing it for years. It’s the idleness I can’t abide, the simple and solitary act of staring at a cup. The luxury of it, knowing that I have other things to do and the objective absurdity of the action itself. People don’t do that. People stare at books and screens and lovers and babies. Maybe out windows if they have reason enough. Tea is for drinking. And all I can think about while staring at the cup is how the tea is getting cold and would go to waste.

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            To be loose is to be in the midst of a dead man’s float in the ocean—

            To calmly hold my breath, let my legs sink down and my arms drop forward, feel sunrays on my back, slowly fading the tattoo between my shoulder blades that I’ve needed to re-lotion for the past two hours. To be loose is to jump up straight in the face of a wave that crashes salty in your nose and face, and let the salt dry crunchy on your skin and let the tan lines form where the salt has spread. To be loose is letting water deaden all the sounds around you until it feels like you can hear secrets in the deep—whereas we always thought it’d be in the sky, I’m convinced it’s below that will solve something. It’s keeping your eyes closed. It’s letting your body react without struggling. It’s floating in a direction you can’t quite fathom because you don’t want to and it’s easy to let the waves take you away. It’s needing to go under until your body makes you stop and resurface and the light hurts your eyes and the waves might be pushing you forward before you catch your breath so you gasp for more and swallow a little sea. It doesn’t sting and you do cough and you go back for more.

—a situation both impractical in land-locked Pittsburgh or calm-laked Minnesota or anywhere else I’ve found myself living.

            But that’s what it is to relax: to not breathe.

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            One particularly restless summer during grad school, I signed up for vocal lessons at a community college. I’d always wished I’d taken choir and band in high school, and I always lamented that I didn’t get chosen for a production of Annie in middle school, despite working up the nerve to sing a few bars of “The Sun’ll Come Out Tomorrow” in front of every other person auditioning.

            My singing instructor was a sweet and loud middle aged woman named Constance who would apologize for misplaying a scale on the piano and then apologize for apologizing. We were not allowed to be sorry at all.

In her class, we were to breathe and yawn and relax. That’s how you protect your vocal chords, she said. Strain begets strain. On the first day Constance had us stretch our arms and shrug our shoulders, up and drop, like the snap of a load-bearing rope. We bent over and rose slowly. We whirled our arms like birds trying to fly. She had us watch her chest and stomach, pardoning her cushion of abdominal fat. Her gut, not her ribs, expanded. Relax the body, then focus on the breath.            

            What’s important, she said, is not the inhale but the exhale.

            Stand up. Straight. Shoulders back and loose. Chin flat like someone in proper society. Blow out every last bit of breath you have in your body—not forcefully like blowing dust off a shelf, but like you might to cool a child’s hand that’s just been burned pink. When your breath gets low, use your gut to push out everything, not just what’s inside your lungs, but clear your windpipe too and even the air in the corners of your mouth. Then wait.

            A reflex you might never have known existed, will gently hiccup inside, push your diaphragm up, encourage you to gasp without bringing in air. It’s a movement that somehow exposes space you missed, air you contained and didn’t know. That’s when you start to breathe. This is where a full breath comes from. Let it in. It is emptying yourself out, then refilling the space that defines a deep breath. It is knowing what is missing before you try to replace it.

And out:

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