It is often hard to notice when you choose to hold your breath.
When playing hide and seek, or lifting something heavy, or watching a movie with an underwater scene, we find ourselves doing it without conscious decision - fists clenched, shoulders tensed, we freeze. Not that holding our breath is at all helpful for our survival, unless a predator with very good ears is looking for us.
Mostly it just presses pause.
A couple weeks ago I was on a sort of field trip for an orchestra competition, and we rode charter buses up through the mountains. The first tunnel we drove through, people were talking and laughing above the muffled rumble of the machine, and as the walls grew close and the sun went out I stopped talking. The conversation sort of halted.
There was only one sigh at the end of that tunnel.
"You hold your breath too?" my bus buddy asked. "My dad taught me! So weird!"
"I wonder why people do that," I said.
We passed through many, many tunnels, winding and straight, broad and narrow, short and long. The strangest part is, the longer we drove, the quieter it would get in the bus through each tunnel, and the greater the sigh at the end. The habit was spreading. It was like we were coming alive again, growing nearer to our roots with each concrete tunnel and incrementally understanding the human of the cave.
It was less superstition and more reverence for life. Things would stop. No movement, no noise, no birds or beasts. No laughter. Above us loomed a mountain older than anything we knew and heavier than anything we've touched. In the tunnel, there is no heaven above, or hell below, or glass to see them through. We are foreigners of a land in which we are not welcome, we are digging through the soul of a rock more sacred than ourselves, we are miners buried with dead canaries and waiting for our lungs to collapse.
Each breath we breathe is stolen.
We are frozen in time as we hurtle through space we ought not occupy.
And then there comes the light we are racing towards, running for our lives, trying desperately to escape the limbo which holds us prisoners, hoping with all we do not have it will set us free and it does. It falls across the roof of the bus like a halo, like a set of wings, and as soon as we touch it we're breathing again.
The last tunnel we passed through on the way back was unimaginably long. There was no way we were holding our breath through this one, we knew. But, gradually, the bus quieted. Movement steadied. No one spoke any longer, we just watched ahead of us for the light we were no longer sure would come. Air was used sparingly. Lungs clenched, eyes darted, feet of percussionists tapped anxiously. Then, after a seeming eternity of darkness, there came the dot of streaming hope, the light of day rushing towards us, and the second we escaped the belly of the mountain the entire bus exhaled and inhaled like we had just resurfaced from an ocean floor. Together. Someone laughed and someone shouted and someone in the front began to applaud until the contagious relief of a limitless sky spread throughout the entire bus.
We had made it.
We laughed and applauded like fish cast from the fishing boat, like birds transcending from the net, because we were alive and we were breathing.
Some things give us our human back.
But I didn't say that, and I didn't say the thing about death either because if words are all I've got to share there are some things saved for people who are sometimes not there. And there are words better whispered than typed.
When playing hide and seek, or lifting something heavy, or watching a movie with an underwater scene, we find ourselves doing it without conscious decision - fists clenched, shoulders tensed, we freeze. Not that holding our breath is at all helpful for our survival, unless a predator with very good ears is looking for us.
Mostly it just presses pause.
A couple weeks ago I was on a sort of field trip for an orchestra competition, and we rode charter buses up through the mountains. The first tunnel we drove through, people were talking and laughing above the muffled rumble of the machine, and as the walls grew close and the sun went out I stopped talking. The conversation sort of halted.
There was only one sigh at the end of that tunnel.
"You hold your breath too?" my bus buddy asked. "My dad taught me! So weird!"
"I wonder why people do that," I said.
We passed through many, many tunnels, winding and straight, broad and narrow, short and long. The strangest part is, the longer we drove, the quieter it would get in the bus through each tunnel, and the greater the sigh at the end. The habit was spreading. It was like we were coming alive again, growing nearer to our roots with each concrete tunnel and incrementally understanding the human of the cave.
It was less superstition and more reverence for life. Things would stop. No movement, no noise, no birds or beasts. No laughter. Above us loomed a mountain older than anything we knew and heavier than anything we've touched. In the tunnel, there is no heaven above, or hell below, or glass to see them through. We are foreigners of a land in which we are not welcome, we are digging through the soul of a rock more sacred than ourselves, we are miners buried with dead canaries and waiting for our lungs to collapse.
Each breath we breathe is stolen.
We are frozen in time as we hurtle through space we ought not occupy.
And then there comes the light we are racing towards, running for our lives, trying desperately to escape the limbo which holds us prisoners, hoping with all we do not have it will set us free and it does. It falls across the roof of the bus like a halo, like a set of wings, and as soon as we touch it we're breathing again.
The last tunnel we passed through on the way back was unimaginably long. There was no way we were holding our breath through this one, we knew. But, gradually, the bus quieted. Movement steadied. No one spoke any longer, we just watched ahead of us for the light we were no longer sure would come. Air was used sparingly. Lungs clenched, eyes darted, feet of percussionists tapped anxiously. Then, after a seeming eternity of darkness, there came the dot of streaming hope, the light of day rushing towards us, and the second we escaped the belly of the mountain the entire bus exhaled and inhaled like we had just resurfaced from an ocean floor. Together. Someone laughed and someone shouted and someone in the front began to applaud until the contagious relief of a limitless sky spread throughout the entire bus.
We had made it.
We laughed and applauded like fish cast from the fishing boat, like birds transcending from the net, because we were alive and we were breathing.
Some things give us our human back.
But I didn't say that, and I didn't say the thing about death either because if words are all I've got to share there are some things saved for people who are sometimes not there. And there are words better whispered than typed.
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