On Breathing

I almost choked on a chick pea last week. I was eating lunch at work, and one slipped down my throat before I could chew it. I felt it move into my esophagus. Slowly. There was a thickness as I breathed, a weight pushing on the inside of my chest as though an unseen hand was squeezing me from inside. I fingered my chest, hoping to coax the errant legume down faster. I drank some leftover cold coffee and felt it nudge the chick pea along. I stood up. I slowed my breathing. I took another sip of the coffee and I waited.

I was reminded of a similar episode years ago--a piece of apple slipped down my throat without my having chewed it. I was walking behind the building where I worked. There was no one else around and if I had choked no one would have noticed at that moment. I was pregnant at the time. I wondered what would happen to the baby if I collapsed, how long it would take for someone to walk by and find me. The dull pressure inside my esophagus winded me.  I could feel this internal organ squeezing and palpitating as it attempted to move the chunk of apple down towards my stomach. I stopped walking, breathed slowly and shallowly, and I waited.

In both instances, I had to turn over control to my body.

As someone who has asthma, I think about breathing a lot. There are times at night when my airwaves close and I wake in a fit of coughing; the spasms within my chest feel like water rushing into my lungs. At other times, a ride on a crowded, dusty bus will bring on a tickle at the base of my throat as my breathing passages tighten, clearing only with a puff from my inhaler. In yoga classes, we are told to focus on the breath, to inhale and exhale to the very depths of our abdomen, by contracting the diaphragm, and fully filling and emptying the lungs. Sometimes it makes me dizzy. If I've had a cold or am experiencing seasonal allergies, I am physically unable to breathe that deeply. But when all is clear within my breathing passages, deep breathing has the calming effect of aloe on a sunburn, the freshness of summer rain.

The thinnest air I have breathed was in Tibet, in Lhasa, at 3,650 meters above sea level. Walking up a flight of 4 or 5 stairs at the hostel winded me as though I had climbed a mountain or crawled in prostration, as some Tibetan pilgrims do for thousands of kilometers from their villages to that holy city where prayer flags whisper blessings into the air. The purest air I have breathed was in Hobart, Tasmania, said to have some of the cleanest air in the world. Breathing, there, was like skating on the smoothest, clearest ice: effortless and liberating.

This morning I awoke abruptly from a dream. I was on a boat, or more like a flat barge. Grace ran away from me just as we crashed into a wave. Water poured over the deck and pushed her off to the side.  She grabbed onto the railing as I lunged towards her--and then I woke. I was lying face down, my nose and mouth planted into my pillow, my breathing slow and laboured. I turned and gulped the air as if I had been suffocating or drowning.

"Breathe deeply," I tell the kids when they are anxious or upset. "It calms your body on the inside, and when the inside of your body is calm, the outside of your body calms down too." It works. It's true. Try it: breathe in for five seconds, hold for five more, breathe out for five again. Slowly. Repeat.

The Lung Association's tagline is "when you can't breathe, nothing else matters". Indeed, time seems to stand still at those moments. There is no before, there is no after. There is only air and the reaching towards it.