May 9, 2017
I like taking walks, for many reasons. Maybe I was fed up with whatever I was doing, maybe I needed some air.
Sometimes I take walks because it feels like there's something heavy inside my chest, a kind of unrest. At those moments I try taking really deep breaths, because it feels like it might help. It feels like the depth of my breaths—how filled my lungs get—have a threshold. It feels like if a single breath was to get past that threshold, the heavy feeling would subside.
So it's not unusual for me to find myself walking around, breathing deeply, focused, hunting for that threshold. If I'm unlucky, the heaviness stays. But in a few cases, after walking around outside for a couple of minutes, I successfully inhale so deeply that the threshold is overwon and during the following exhale I feel a big, fuzzy calm take hold of me.
I like those moments.