Three breaths
*
I find time disorientating. I struggle to process it; next month might as well be a whole other lifetime. A week I can grasp if I squint a bit. I live my life in days, one at a time, with little thought beyond one's end. A day is about the maximum length of time I can hold in my mind as one whole unit.
It's no bad way to live. It means I hold time lightly. It gives me a firm shape to paint a day onto and wards off both anxiety and unnecessary nostalgia. I carry very little over. Moods and baggage are left behind with each new sleep and I wake every morning feeling the relief of a blank page. I start again. I try my best -- and I do, I am nothing if not a trier -- and if it all goes wrong, it doesn't matter, not really. I steer towards my save point. I try again the next day. It is a great comfort to me, this idea of always another do-over. Each night, sleep shakes my hand and tells me I've got the job. It sharpens my pencils.
It's the unpredictability of my days that has led me here, I think. I don't know if I will be able to do the same things as yesterday, and often I can't. Simple things: being able to stand on my two feet, climb the stairs, prepare food. What work I could do the day before may be laughable today. Each day, I am handed a different set tools and different resources, and so each day warrants a whole new plan, a whole new set of expectations; there's no use looking beyond it. That's why I clutch at my day like a diary. It's the firmest thing I have to work with, and so work with THAT I will.
Some days, though, I find I need a smaller unit; even a day is too long. Life comes at me faster even than that. I am writing to tell you that I've found it: the smallest unit of workable time. I think it might have changed my life.
*
*
Some days are cruel, there's no denying it. Some days I am very ill indeed, or nothing stays still long enough to grasp it. It started on a day like this -- the kind where you want to protest that a day is too long, a day is too hard, too unpredictable and unfathomable, and you reach and fumble for something smaller, something you can manage, that you can hold and can't fail at, desperate for comfort, desperate for something reliable.
I don't know how long it's been since you sat and breathed in and out as if it was the most important and most interesting thing in the world, but I have to do it a lot and I tell you: I have found a friend. Some days, I miss having someone to pray to, but then I breathe in and out again, cool and slow, and it fills me, and I think maybe this is what answered prayed feels like after all. To breathe now feels like resting against a great, warm dog. That I can do it whenever I want to is a treat I can hardly get over. Does this sound strange to you? It's the truth.
Meditation clicked for me when I realised that it's simply about learning to watch change at a microscopic level. You breathe in and out and you watch the changes as they come. A sound comes with one breath, a sensation with another. With the next breath, a thought overlaps it. With the next, that thought shifts and moves to be replaced in turn. When you watch like this, you realise that everything is changing all the time, even pain. You realise too that you're still here: that you've already survived it. By learning to sit and process change at this smallest level, you train in managing the bigger changes -- the ones as big as a day or a week or even longer than that. Time, suddenly, is achievable this way.
Can't manage a day? Who cares: I can breathe. A breath is short enough to make it impossible to fail, but long enough, still, to be interesting. I am amazed at how much changes in the space of one breath. I mean it: have you noticed it too?
*
*
I sat and breathed slow and steady the other day and saw an image in my mind. I saw myself bent over a piece of glass that I held in my hands. I breathed each new breath onto the glass, and each breath coloured it. With each breath, a distinct pattern of sensation, feeling, thought appeared on the glass like a picture. Some things that appeared were pleasant, some were not, but with next breath, it would change a little and a new picture would form. It was like watching a kaleidoscope, and every single breath was different; every one new. I have tested it since, over and over, and I can tell you now, I've had no two breaths completely the same.
I made three breaths into pictures and that's what I share with you here, to show you how each was different, incorporating different things. I hope you will scroll back to look at them now and think "Oh!" in surprise. I hope you will take a new breath and imagine what it might look like.
For the first time, I think I can see how change can be beautiful, safe, broken down like this into its composite parts.
I think I am losing my loyalty to the day as a unit of time.
Breath -- friend -- let's stay close.