Breath Becoming Body
Breath: it’s where it all starts. We all take it, even if we don’t notice — even when we don’t want to notice. Breath is always there. In many ways, it’s one of the most bodily things about us. It tells us (and others) what we’ve consumed, if we’ve cleaned our mouths recently, if we’re stressed or relaxed. Controlling it is a sort of superpower, to contain that which sustains you.
Breath, a real breath, can be sublime.
Our bodies begin with our breath. Or, well, maybe not begin — who’s to say if a gust of wind on its way to become breath, or a plucked tomato on its way to becoming brunch, isn’t you as well? — but it at least offers one route of mapping our bodies. Our bodies change all the time. We molt and shed, drip and emit. The act of breathing is just a little quicker. Breath leaves and enters us so often that we don’t think of it as ever being part of us. But where would we be without it? Not far.
Breath can be joyous. I like breathing, more so than its function of keeping me alive. I appreciate my pair of lungs and all their little cilia. I time how long I can hold my breath; I love to run aimlessly, just gallop away across a field or sidewalk. In that feeling of not quite having enough oxygen, of needing to breathe that much more so you can keep going, breath becomes movement itself. Breath becomes striding legs and pumping arms. Breath becomes you.
And yet, the convergence of an act and the person doing it — you — isn’t always pleasant. Breath smells. Breath hurts. Sometimes people breathe smelly breath in your face, and sometimes you hold yours and you feel small and constrained. But I also think we can appreciate this unpleasantness about breath. Breath tells you about yourself and others. It’s the soft data of our lives. Perhaps more than that, it’s a tool, an instrument for measuring the weather or a gauge for your own feelings. In its immateriality, breath actually proves a medium for connection, whether or not the connection of garlic breath to my nose in the architecture school elevator is desirable is another question. But connection nonetheless! Breath reminds us that we are permeable.
So, take some more time with your breath. Hold it for a few seconds and let it go. Bring it back in. Breathe in, breathe out. Wonder at how much it does. When does that puff of air become you? When does the oxygen that guides your thoughts and fuels your strides become those actions? And when does that double shot of espresso breathed right into the unsuspecting nostrils of your cute TA become your essence? Take joy in the particles which cross the fictitious bounds of body moment by moment. Marvel in your porosity. Breath.
