Breath

This is Western Coffee—notes on building the creative body. Last time: Speed. The whole series is here. Please share this email; you can sign up free below.

A couple of days ago I found myself swimming 25-yard lengths fully underwater, flippers on, 10 times in close succession. A pair of these dives can get me winded most of the time but, in the way a body will do if you let it, mine surprised me with a sudden new ability—a concert of kicking form and calm focus that made something different of my ordinary breath. I came up gasping only once; and somewhere in the mix I got halfway into a second consecutive length without surfacing. This capacity couldn’t have built up overnight. It was as if my body just changed a setting somewhere—like those cars that go faster if you pay a subscription.

This episode illustrates one of the main justifications for routine: You can’t really know in advance when you’re going to kick ass. (You can guarantee against it, however, by not showing up.) Recently I described having reached a certain freedom from “shoulds” when it comes to working out, and experiencing even challenging movement as a joyful showcase of embodiment. That is not to say it isn’t a slog at times. What it never is is: slog, lesser slog, minimal slog, victory. The slogs are sprinkled in with the neutral days, and they in turn betray no hint of a looming breakthrough. The same is true, without amendment, of creative work.

I wrote in The Atlantic a couple of years ago about the pandemic’s early transformations of the fitness industry. That essay ended with a paean to gyms, which at the time were closed:

It’s not incidental that being there means exposing yourself to the breath of others; that is, in fact, largely the point. The breath of language, the breath of yogic pacing, the heaving breath of the dead-lifter, the rhythmic breath of the cyclist in the studio, with the music thrumming through their every stroke: beat, breath, left; beat, breath, right. We who still have our breath: Where will we go?

Working out at home (or outside) has proved durably convenient, and it’s great to have the option. But I went back to the gym shortly after getting vaccinated in the spring last year. I missed the breath, and the breathers. For many months we still had to wear masks there, which gave it an attenuated quality. Everything we’d been used to burned a little colder. By contrast, my yoga class the other night was cheek by jowl, and I felt a little pang of nostalgia—can you imagine—for those sparse and solemn days.

“The mechanisms of breathing,” the instructor Mark Stephens writes in his book Teaching Yoga, “were first properly explained by Galenus around 170 CE and in much greater detail only in the sixteenth century by Leonardo da Vinci, who understood that when more space is made available in the lungs by the expansion of the thorax, the weight of the atmosphere forces air in through the trachea to fill the expanded space.”

This is an important point: We’re not “breathing in” so much as surrendering to the weight of the atmosphere, which fills us the way pool water would (though fatally) in the deep end. Mastery of the breath is not control of it per se so much as the navigation of a vast enclosing medium, like swimming at sea or spinning in space. Maybe as unfathomable as the scale of the universe is the tininess of its portions where a human could breathe. We are connected to everything, sure, but nothing so much as the air, which squeezes life into us as long as we can make room. To make the room: This is a good reason to keep moving.

Coming Tuesday: Housekeeping.

Kindly send me your thoughts, questions, and provocations: dmichaelowen@gmail.com. And say hi on Instagram, or let’s Peloton together: @leggy_blond.