One way to measure the brilliance of a given year is surely how many times you see the sea. This year might just be a record: in Feb I swam up in Edinburgh, in March I walked along the coast in Plymouth and Morecambe, I made it to Iona in May, last month I stopped off in Whitely and wandered in Whitby, a few weeks ago I picnicked on the shores of Folkestone. I am like a coastal version of the hungry caterpillar.
The year so far has felt like a beautiful whirlwind: a job change that has brought me a lot of life, getting settled in the house (replete with painting, grout pens, misadventures in plant-rearing), interspersed by seeing and celebrating with friends.
I’m reading lots, befriending new music albums, and making steady headway through the goals that I made at the beginning of the year. And of course, making more plans to see the sea.
I recently listened to a podcast episode of the Sacred with Martin Shaw and Felix Marquardt that I’d highly recommend. They have a lovely conversation about the fact that “life is a contact sport”, or, as Martin Buber puts it “all living is meeting”. How those phrases feel to say is how my year is feeling to live.
Contact sports, life included, are of course notorious for running the risk of injuries. Life is not all sunshine; sunshine is just more photographed than rain.
I’m acutely aware that my small little life and my blog post writing is situated within the month that the world’s average temperature surpassed 17 degrees for the first time, and in which ice levels in Antarctica have dropped six standard deviations below the daily average for the past 30 years in what should (but won’t be) a one-in-7.5-million-years event. We will have to save more on that for another day.
For now, it is time to return to tradition. Each year when I write a reflection post in July, I try to pick out some (sage) life lesson that I am encountering (or sometimes more accurately, that I am being encountered by).
This year, I am learning to breathe deeply.
This in part is a wide observation about the total gold dust and luxury of good health. Health is something I no longer take for granted as adulthood brings more experiences of the many different ways in which health can fail. I myself have been to the doctor’s more times this year than the previous three put together. Multiple rounds of antibiotics, referrals to the foot and ankle team, a first go at cervical screening – it’s all happening!
But I am also choosing this because of a specific learning as I work to reach one of my goals this year: to be able to do 20 push-ups. I started the year not being able to even do a sit-up, and I can now do a few-ish push-ups (so there’s a way to go). It’s the first time that I’ve done strengths training, and one of the things they repeat is “remember to keep breathing”. It transpires that it’s incredibly easy to hold your breath when struggling to hold a plank or pushing through some dumbbell exercises.
There are many different directions you could take a consideration of the importance of breathing deeply, which I’ll leave you to think on in your own time. But this choice really is intended to be taken in the direct physiological sense. Taken alongside choir and running and paying more attention to how I handle stress, I am thinking a lot more about how to breathe. There is absolutely such a thinking as learning to breathe deeply, and it’s a lesson worth our wonderfully physiological and embodied selves learning.
thejoyofrachel 
Rachel,
That’s one packed year!
Breathing, like many of the most important things in life often taken for granted falter when neglected.
Alan
LikeLike