BreathBy: Lindsey Hurtt

Breath is a scientific thing like photosynthesis and the way your skin cells grow back when they all die and fall off. I am not a scientific person, but I have heard these things happen, and they offer good explanations for why plants grow and why I still have skin so I believe them.

Even though breath is a scientific thing, it drives creativity. I cannot beg right brain-edness, and then breath will not apply to me. It applies to everything. Breath determines productivity, creativity, and sanity.

A brain deprived of oxygen loses part of itself. Lungs deprived of oxygen lose the race, the game, the contest. Breath gives strength. Deep breathing and meditation have been shown in studies (I am not sure which studies, but I have heard this many times in my short life) to improve thinking, studying, working, doing, creating, and remembering.

Writer’s block may or may not exist, but for the sake of this argument it, or something like it, does exist, and when it comes, and a writer stops thinking about what they are not writing and realizes that as they sit there and exist their body is carrying on without them something like a gasp will usually be emitted. This gasp is evidence of breath-holding, a bad habit of stressed out college students and stressed out people everywhere.

Breath-holding actually probably makes individuals, and the collective population of developed nations and cultures based on productivity, more stressed out than they were before because now not only is everything in the world bearing down on them and

threatening to crush the delicate filigree of bones and tendons, but also they are suffocating themselves.

Breath is good. Breath is to be guarded, treasured, and embraced. I, for one, will be an advocate of the breath empowering, flowing through, my own body –giving me life, peace, focus, and strength.

Just breathe.