On Breathing

One of my 2017 resolutions is to practice mindfulness meditation—real original for a Bay Area techie, huh? Though perhaps cliche (and ironic that it’s popular among those whose products impede our psychological freedom), I think being mindful and present is a worthwhile pursuit in this hyperconnected and overstimulated era. This is particularly true going into a year (or four) that promises to be intellectually challenging on multiple fronts, to put it lightly.

A big part of mindfulness mediation—for beginners, at least—is a focus on breathing. Those who do yoga, and especially those who scuba dive, will be familiar with a focus on the breath. The latter can be a deeply mesmerizing experience; your breath becomes your world, most of what you can hear and much of what you can see. This gives you an acute awareness of the critical role breathing plays in keeping you alive, not to mention the fact that it’s been millions of years since you belonged to the alien undersea landscape you’re temporarily visiting, even if some of our mammalian ancestors found a way to permanently return.

Breathing is one of the basic automatic functions controlled by the medulla oblongata, and the rate increases or decreases depending on need, for example when exercising or sleeping. But unlike something like heartbeat, you also have the option for manual override. Trying to toggle between manual and automated breathing can be strange and potentially unsettling; it’s difficult to determine exactly when you’ve handed over control, which is maybe a microcosm of macro trends in modern society.

How remarkable it is that we breathe almost nonstop our entire lives, most of the time without even noticing. The longest anyone has gone without breathing is 24 minutes, and with practice you can hold a saxophone note for twice that long. This circular breathing is possible because we’re able to breathe through both our nose and mouth, but as pointed out by Neil deGrasse Tyson, respiring through the same hole that we eat and drink from is a terrible design flaw (take that, intelligent design advocates). Many people die from asphyxiation every year, through choking and other causes. There is a good argument that breathing—at least in its current implementation—is a bug, not a feature. But it does allow us to speak, sing, and laugh.

Sadly, not everyone can breathe on their own, and thousands of children with polio spent time in iron lungs. Thankfully, the disease has largely been eradicated through vaccination, but not in every country; there is still a risk of resurgence. Lung cancer has one of the lowest survival rates among cancers, and it doesn’t just happen to those who smoke. When Breath Becomes Air is a great book on the subject, among other topics.

Depending on the situation, breath is the first thing you check to determine if someone is still alive, and currently an average person takes about 700 million breaths in a lifetime. Some many more, some many less, and this could change drastically in the future, in either direction. Almost all living things respire in one way or another. Plants breathe, and symbiotically mostly the opposite elements as us. Even the Earth itself breathes.

May all of us still be breathing, hopefully easier than we are now, this time next year.