Catching my breath, or trying to breathe

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I wrote this in 2017. I like it. I never published it. Here it is.

I've started meditation. I spend about fifteen minutes a day listening to a very calm voice on an app on my iPhone tell me to listen to my breath, and I do, and it centers me.

I started meditation because I'm finding that the way the world swirls around me has, especially lately, been enough to take that breath away, and I need help to recenter and reconnect to myself, help to breathe so I can quell the anxiety that seems to bubble up out of nowhere, like when I'm sitting in a parking lot or preparing lunch or any other mundane task, and I clutch at my heart and take a deep heavy breath and feel like I'm carrying a stone that keeps growing heavier.

The anxiety I feel is not related to any one thing or event; rather, more like a reaction to the wild cacophony of events that are around me. Things that for my whole life I've sort of taken for granted feel like they're in flux or falling apart. People I know are dying of cancer, or losing their faith--faith in God, faith in our Church, faith in our Country.  Things that I once just assumed to be fact, like my world view of the human condition, the basic humaneness that we all share, now feels less like fact and more like perception, so that I wonder what is real, what is solid? I feel, like it's almost palpable at times, a sense of cosmic anxiety that weighs heavily on my shoulders, at once wanting to help and not knowing how to help; at once wanting to shoulder it and wanting to shelter myself from it.

So, I breathe. In and out. I listen to my breath, and I find my center, and I am calm.

Comments

Anaise said…
Hooooo, boy! I understand this more than I know how to express!
February 27, 2020 at 7:06 AM
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