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The bezel is the piece of the watch that secures the crystal to the face. On most watches, the bezel is stationary. On some it spins, mainly to help divers keep track of time elapsed on a dive. While I don’t dive I do enjoy having something tactile to fiddle with. The satisfying clicks of the bezel on my yellow Nautica watch with the black rubber strap were always available in times of distraction.
In December of 2005, the rotating bezel of my watch stopped spinning.
This would have been otherwise insignificant had it not coincided with the fact that, at that moment in time, I was having an extremely hard time breathing.
It was more than just a moment. It was the last month of my last semester of college in Arizona. I was weeks away from graduation, a final parting with my girlfriend, and a return home to New York to start my new life. While a celebratory trip to Australia was on the calendar for just after the new year, I couldn’t get excited enough about it to relax. I couldn’t catch a deep breath.
My stuck bezel and my inefficient lungs became partner indicators of my current sentiments about my own life. In some ways, I felt I had progressed as far as I could in the environment I was in. The idea of trying to start the next stage of my life in the same place where I had spent the last 4 years seemed almost impossible.
I can’t pinpoint a specific reason I was having a hard time breathing. Maybe I was so nervous about graduation I was secretly hyperventilating. Or maybe it was because I had just realized breathing wasn’t something I was particularly good at.
Some months before, my then girlfriend, the one I would be saying goodbye to for good, was sitting next to be on the couch while we watched TV. She sat up abruptly, looked at me with great concern and said: “BREATHE!”
Apparently, I had been holding my breath for some unknown amount of time. It wasn’t something I was doing purposely. I hadn’t inhaled deeply to time my endurance. I had simply stopped breathing.
“Why were you holding your breath?” she asked. I shrugged and gave my best guess. “I think I was thinking.”
Admittedly holding one’s breath isn’t the best way to go about concentrating on important thoughts, but from that moment on I started to slowly realize; that is exactly what I did. Most of the time she would point it out to me. But I gradually noticed while zoning out (something I frequently did) I would suddenly exhale sharply, catching myself off guard as well as out of breath.
Why the hell was I holding my breath, to begin with?
It was a question I never really pursued. My interrupted respiration simply became a small physical anomaly; a part of my life I never really took time to understand, like the symmetrical hairless spots on my wrists, or my ability to cross one eye at a time. And while I didn’t take time to understand the genesis of it I did begin to notice a pattern.
I often held my breath while thinking about things I was worried about. My career, my (hopefully) untapped potential, my purpose. It progressed to hypothetical situations of varying degrees of negative. Not breathing while I mentally went through imagined conflicts was somehow easier. As though I could hold my breath come out the other side unscathed.
It moved onto other things requiring varying degrees of focus. I found myself holding my breath while editing videos, while writing, and washing dishes.
It wasn’t the gravity of the task that dictated when I started holding my breath, but merely the amount of attention it required to complete successfully. Generally, it’s not something other people realize I’m doing.
Perhaps I could argue it was a type of energy conservation. As though the act of slowing down the physical momentum of the rising and falling of my chest could divert that energy to my brain. I’ve never stopped breathing intentionally. I don’t follow a process of consciously taking a deep breath before I think about a problem. It is almost as if my body has the ability to zone out and to breathe… but not at the same time.
There was, and is, a strange gratification I get from thinking without oxygen. It feels like an internal pressure forcing cognitive results. Like the immediacy of my rapidly declining air supply adds an urgency and a lucidity to my brain workings. I feel as though if I detach myself from the rhythm of our life it might be easier to see through it. But it is when I come back to breathing, inhaling and exhaling as my body wishes to, an ease will return. An understanding. Sometimes even, a clarity.
I readily admit I stop breathing when I am worried too. This has the negative effect of making whatever stress I am dealing with seem more significant, more powerful. Anything would appear to be more powerful if it prevented you from breathing.
That way of dealing with stress has made its way into how I sleep. I will emerge from a dream, usually, one in which I am being chased, and wakeup not with a start or shout, but a sudden realization I am not breathing. At some point, I had exhaled and just stopped.
My first breath will be a large one, unfamiliar and fulfilling, like somebody emerging from a kind cryo sleep one sees in the movies. It frustrates me greatly.
Since breathing is something we pretty much have always done, and never really learned how to do, it’s a disquieting feeling to realize you suddenly have stopped doing something everybody should be doing automatically. It is in many ways the core of our existence. So to struggle breathing is to struggle being.
Even as I write this I am without a deeper understanding of why I do this. I am left not with answers but results, not positive ones. Negative ones, years of holding my breath have caused.
My poor oxygen intake reached its peak shortly after I turned 30. After leaving a 2-year relationship I suddenly found myself in the distant but familiar college scenario of not being able to take a deep breath.
It was a daily frustration. It didn’t matter if I was walking down the street or working out, those super gratifying deep breaths that feel like they recharge your whole body were so elusive as to become foreign. Seventy percent of a deep breath is not a deep breath at all. The closest I came felt unfulfilling and inefficient. As my shoulders reached for my ears I would try desperately to push past whatever wall was blocking me internally, only to fail.
It was most obvious while eating. Temporarily obscuring one of my main paths of oxygen made me realize not only how bad I was at breathing while eating, but how bad this whole thing had become.
I was angry, I was exhausted, I was desperate. I had not changed my habits, my environment or my physical activity, and yet I had gone from a man in a relationship breathing normally to a single man, clawing at breaths.
That desperation eventually led to research and memories of the breathing exercises I had learned in yoga classes. While extremely unnatural feeling, I started consciously changing the way I breathed.
If wasn’t easy. While focusing on taking 10 consecutive deep breaths I almost always got distracted by breath 5 or 6 and would skip down a mental tangent for a length of time before I realized I needed to start over.
It felt like it took forever.
Despite my slow inhales, belly breaths and relaxed shoulders, I still found myself struggling for those deeper breaths from time to time. Gradually though, the air returned to my lungs. The desperation I felt day to day dissipated, replaced with an understanding of the control I had over my own life.
I still hold my breath. Washing dishes and deep thinking finds me trapping air in my lungs in an effort to… I’m still not sure what. But my daily life finds me breathing deeply, sometimes too often, as I try to exhale the worries that manage to trap themselves inside me.
Seemingly apropos of nothing I will exhale deeply prompting my girlfriend to ask “Are you OK?” The suddenness of the exhale makes it seems like I am exasperated or frustrated about something, but often it’s just me remembering how to breathe.
Several weeks after I graduated college and returned to New York, I boarded a flight by myself to Australia. On the 6 hours to San Francisco and the subsequent 15 to Sydney, I sat with my thoughts about college, my anxiety about the next stage of my life and my excitement about traveling.
My second day in Sydney I made my way to the ocean. Wading in the waters of Bondi beach I felt blissful. I dove into waves, I picked up fistfuls of sand, I gazed back at the shore. And in my state of bliss, I fiddled with my watch, spinning the bezel, feeling the gratification of each of the 60 clicks. It had become unstuck. My smile was unavoidable.
I immediately took a deep breath, a real one, complete and fulfilling, the salt air running to the bottom of my lungs and out again.
It was the first deep breath I had taken in a month. I stood up and took another.
My smile shifted into a kind of smirk as I thought about my life. I thought about where I was literally and metaphorically. Saltwater on my wrist, salt air in my lungs.
And in that moment, 10,000 miles from home, from my future and my past and all I worried about, something in me and on me… released.
It was all in my head. It was all in my lungs. Apparently, I still controlled both.
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I’ve noticed the same thing in myself, brother. A lifelong asthmatic and “struggler with air”, I feel there are deeper issues at play; maybe karmic, even multi-dimensional, who knows (or cares, really). My best practice is to be conscious of my breath during the day as I am during meditation practice, and also to go deep within to find those things that seem to constrict my life force – and then ask what underlies that fear. Good luck, and keep up the good work!
Hi Eric – I had childhood asthma and I think, realizing now, perhaps that gasping feeling might have even brought back some childhood memories of feeling desperate to breathe. It’s a terrible feeling and I am sorry you have felt that your entire life. Thank you for sharing your approach. I think you absolutely have the right idea. I hope we can continue to breathe deeply well into the future.