Don't Hold Your Breath

     While I've written about breath and breathing before, I was caught by a recent piece in Discover about the topic and how the average person should ideally be breathing about 6 times per minute; that's one breath every ten seconds.  Even better would be to breathe only 4 times per minute or one breath every fifteen seconds.  I tried it and felt as if I was about to drown.  My own breathing is about 11 breaths every minute, and no, I won't be a candidate for free diving (such divers often hold their breath for six minutes or more).  My friend can hold his breath for well over two minutes without much effort (truly, gasp!).  But it was a different piece in The Atlantic that caught my eye, one on friendship, and what happens when they suddenly (or more often, slowly) dissolve.

     Okay, I wrote about this topic in an earlier piece, but this particular article made me think of those "friends" who had simply dropped out of our lives without explanation.  Three come to mind, two being couples we had shared many dinners with and hiked with and did many activities with; the other being a person who watched our pets (it was her business).  We knew each of these people for nearly two decades.  All three disappearing from our lives were puzzling, us making numberous attempts to find out what happened, sending out old letters they had once sent (one emphasized the importance of friendship), bumping into them at different places, and even asking each of them if we had done something to offend them.  All were met with an apologetic excuse and an assurance that they would be in touch or would give us a call, each encounter ending with a "let's try to get together soon."  It never happened.  It remains puzzling to this day, that lack of closure.  The article in The Atlantic was subtitled: The older we get, the more we need our friends—and the harder it is to keep them.

     Said part of the piece: With midlife comes a number of significant upheavals and changes, ones that prove too much for many friendships to withstand.  By middle age, some of the dearest people in your life have gently faded away.  You lose friends to marriage, to parenthood, to politics—even when you share the same politics. (Political obsessions are a big, underdiscussed friendship-ender in my view, and they seem to only deepen with age.)  You lose friends to success, to failure, to flukish strokes of good or ill luck. (Envy, dear God—it’s the mother of all unspeakables in a friendship, the lulu of all shames.)  These life changes and upheavals don’t just consume your friends’ time and attention.  They often reveal unseemly characterological truths about the people you love most, behaviors and traits you previously hadn’t imagined possible.  Those are brutal.  And I’ve still left out three of the most common and dramatic friendship disrupters: moving, divorce, and death.  Though only the last is irremediable.  The unhappy truth of the matter is that it is normal for friendships to fade, even under the best of circumstances.  The real aberration is keeping them...The percentage of Americans who say they don’t have a single close friend has quadrupled since 1990, according to the Survey Center on American Life.

     Really?  See if you identify with this later portion of the piece: On the positive side of the ledger: I am a loyal friend.  I am an empathetic friend.  I seldom, if ever, judge.  Tell me you murdered your mother and I’ll say, Gee, you must have been really mad at her.  I am quick to remind my friends of their virtues, telling them that they are beautiful, they are brilliant, they are superstars.  I spend money on them.  I often express my love.  On the negative side: I’m oversensitive to slights and minor humiliations, which means I’m wrongly inclined to see them as intentional rather than pedestrian acts of thoughtlessness, and I get easily overwhelmed, engulfed.  I can almost never mentally justify answering a spontaneous phone call from a friend, and I have to force myself to phone and email them when I’m hard at work on a project.  I’m that prone to monomania, and that consumed by my own tension.  Bottom line, the author seems to be asking each of us to answer the question, do you feel that you're a good person?  And to be honest, I think pretty much everyone --from the mass shooter to the ER nurse-- would answer yes.  So where's the dividing line?

     Often just a single crisis can bring out our hidden traits, throw off our balance in life.  Running low on money, facing a water shortage (portions of the Rhine and the Rio Grande have neared the point of running dry), even the blazing heat can bring out frustration and perhaps anger at how things may be spiraling out of your once-safe patterned world.  But friends remain...or do they?  Think back to how the pool of "friends" you had from school or work has likely dwindled to just a few.  As one of my friends from junior high school asked, "who's the friend you've known the longest?  It's me!"  And he was right since my friend from grade school had now passed away.  So high school.  How many?  College.  How many?  Early jobs.  How many?  Current or later jobs?  Neighbors?  Strangers from a vacation?  We move on through life gathering and shedding, some unexpectedly and some for reasons we don't understand (such as the three friends mentioned above).  Some friend-"ships" just sink.  Said the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of the Atlantic piece, Jennifer Senior: At best, those dead friendships merely hurt; at worst, they feel like personal failures, each one amounting to a little divorce...You feel bereft, for one thing.  As if someone has wandered off with a piece of your history.  And you fear for your reputation.  Friends are the custodians of your secrets, the eyewitnesses to your weaknesses.  Every confession you’ve made—all those naked moments—can be weaponized.

     So jump over to human history.  I happened to read an older piece from The New Yorker on our early, early ancestors, those hunter-gatherers who roamed the planet for 188,000 years before the advent of agriculture and the domestication of animals; what is considered the beginning of "modern" humans some 12,000 years ago.  This led to the rise of towns and cities and eventually, our bold step forward in innovation and progress.  But the article implies that such an accepted view is likely wrong.*  So if that is the case --that something we've so accepted throughout our lives could be wrong-- are our friendships any different?  With the average marriage lasting just over 8 years, we in the U.S. have one of the highest divorce rates (nearly 50%) so one has to ask --be it friends or spouses-- how could we so misjudge people?  Are friendships meant to even be long-lasting?  And when friendships do end, even if without explanation, are we tending to blame ourselves?

     Biology professor Dave Goulson, author of Silent Earth and the potential and devastating decline of insects, wrote this about the transformation of a caterpillar: Imagine you are a full-grown caterpillar.  You digest your final meal of leaves, then spin yourself a silken pad to hold you tight to a stem.  You then split out of your old skin, revealing a new, smooth brown skin beneath.  You no longer have eyes, or limbs, or any external openings except tiny holes called spiracles to allow you to breathe.  You are entirely helpless, and will remain so for weeks, perhaps months...Inside your shiny pupal skin your body dissolves, the cells of your tissues and organs preprogrammed to die and disintegrate, until you are little more than a soup.  A few clusters of embryonic cells remain, and these proliferate, growing entirely new organs and structures, building you a brand new body.  Once it is ready, and the time is right, you split open your pupal skin and underneath have grown another one, this time complete with large eyes, a long, coiled proboscis for drinking and beautiful wings covered in iridescent scales that you must inflate by pumping blood into their veins before they harden.  And despite the view of The Atlantic's Ed Yong who felt that an insect apocalypse was "absurd," Goulson brings up a larger point: ... beyond the fate of insects: How do we preserve our rapidly changing world when the unknowns are vast and the cost of inaction is potentially high?

     The translated Danish novel, The Employees, views a blending of both human and human-like metamorphosis, a world where memories and dreams and longings are somewhat easily contained.  Said a review in The New York Review of Books about such a craft: And what would it mean to know that these two rooms contained every space we ever occupied, every morning (November on Earth, five degrees Celsius, sun dazzling low in the morning sky, the child in the carrier seat on the back of the bicycle), every day (the ivy reddening in the frost on the outside of the office building) and every night (in the room below the stone pines, someone’s breath upon your eyelid), and that every place you ever knew existed there in these two recreation rooms, like a ship floating freely in darkness, encompassed by dust and crystals, without gravity, without earth, in the midst of eternity; without humus and water and rivers, without offspring, without blood; without the creatures of the sea, without the salt of the oceans, and without the water lily stretching up through the cloudy pond toward the sun?  Perhaps add to that, longtime friends?  Do we work to keep them or do we simply let them go?

     Long ago, as in decades ago, I remember being fascinated by a book by Judith Viorst, a book she titled Necessary Losses.  The publisher summed the book up in this manner: In Necessary Losses, Judith Viorst turns her considerable talents to a serious and far-reaching subject: how we grow and change through the losses that are a certain and necessary part of life.  She argues persuasively that through the loss of our mothers’ protection, the loss of the impossible expectations we bring to relationships, the loss of our younger selves, and the loss of our loved ones through separation and death, we gain deeper perspective, true maturity, and fuller wisdom about life.  Another review described her book this way: As we grow older, new experiences paradoxically narrow our conceptions of self, and we surprise ourselves by being unlike who we once thought we were and might have been.  These surprises are gains in themselves...She suggests that mourning is vital to processing grief and restoring one’s mental and physical well-being.  Fixating on one’s grief, conversely, can cause sickness.  Viorst asserts that the loss of a loved one, no matter how important he or she was, also has a finite duration: the person who grieves adapts to the loved one’s absence and moves on.

     That high school friend, that kid next-door to your childhood home, that person you dated for 4 years, that weight you lost or gained since college, even that person who you once were.  Those were all then, all pieces of you that perhaps, like a caterpillar, shaped and pre-formed you for what you are today.  Necessary losses.  Our breaths disappear from us but remain there in the ether.  And it is said that while there are more stars in the universe than there are grains of sand on Earth, there are also more atoms in a single grain of sand than there are stars in the universe.  We can't understand it all so perhaps shouldn't try to understand ourselves...or our friends.  But then I can't even comprehend molecules.  In the book A Molecule Away from Madness (Tales of the Hijacked Brain), author Sara Manning Peskin reminds us that while we picture molecules as being such things as hydrogen and oxygen (combining to make water), the largest bio-molecule may be right inside each of us...our DNA.   We may begin a new era of understanding, of making and keeping friends, of seeing eye to eye on different subjects, of toning down the anger and rhetoric, of slowing down our lives, of recognizing that this planet can only give so much before it too gives up, of recognizing that working together is far easier than working apart, of wondering if "give peace a chance" should be more than just a song or a phrase.  All things are possible.  Just don't hold your breath...

*One argument against the early arrival of agriculture was that the failure of an entire crop could prove a disaster and thus such "advances" likely came after towns and such were established and able to weather such a calamity.

Addendum: For an interesting op-ed on how today's world has affected a respiratory therapist, check out Scientific American.