Randomly pick a catastrophe

   I had to return to a lesson I learned 16 years ago: remembering to exhale.
  Sounds silly but in this hurly burly existence in the United States of America (and the rest of 'the west' to a lesser degree) we rarely take time to slow down, preferring instead to hit a wall before we are forced to stop.
  But what I learned 16 years ago was the importance of breathing; specifically remembering to exhale completely, fully. Otherwise you get caught up in the 'gasps' of experience and eventually collapse (out of breath, so to speak).
   But it's so stupidly obvious that in order to live we have to breathe. We never seem to forget to eat but we know it is vital, and we dissect the value and flavors of food like no other survival necessity. Mein Gott im Himmel — ya gotta eat!
   But breathing? How boring can you get? It's almost beneath us to consider its value to health — mental and physical — and it seems we don't give this non-visual manna any respect.
   Randomly pick a catastrophe as a marker, such as September 11, 2001, and think about whether you have completely absorbed that experience, processed it, and then let it go. Witnessing the pillars of flaming death falling into Manhattan resulted in one massive gasp from all who saw it ... again and again and again, each time inducing a gasp from the viewer.
   Track the tragedies, disappointments, emergencies, surprises, scares, setbacks in life: those times that literally physically 'take your breath away' and think: Did I completely exhale after that or did I keep a little bit of it in? Did I absorb the impact of the moment deeply enough and then take the time to completely push that effect escape my being?
   Or did I hold it in, thus inviting gasp after gasp after gasp after gasp to invade my lungs, my cranium, my being? Probably not; you probably weren't even aware of what your breathing pattern was at the time, and that "inaction" or second part of a vital process went unfulfilled thus presenting an internal imbalance.
   Here's Merriam-Webster's description of breathe: to take in oxygen and give out carbon dioxide through natural processes.
   I fear most of us are walking around with a lot more trapped carbon monoxide in our bodies than we could ever need.
  So I had to relearn how to breathe: How to let it go. How to deal with it and let it go. How to deal with it, talk to someone about it and let it go.
  There's too many times we lurch from one crisis to the next and don't take the time to briefly pause, slowly but surely exhale the angst, and go on.
   And be glad your parents didn't name you Brett M. Sloppy.
  Editor's note: Mudslide photo from http://people.uwec.edu/wirztl/EnHaz/index2.html