Need to breathe

I wonder if a study has ever been done on the relationship between good stories and breathing.

I've never really noticed it before this week. Perhaps it's because lately I've been discontent and desperate for some escape that I became conscious of this phenomenon.

This week, amidst all the hustle and bustle, the pressures and pains, the confusion and questions, I opened the pages of a brand new book... began to lose sense of the world around me. I took in a great big deep breath.... realizing I had been holding my breath all this time. Have you ever been in that place?

Sometimes life's rhythm is too monotonous and the story causes us to hold our breath. All to remind us that we are alive. We need air to survive and to not take it for granted.

Breathing is the flow of life. To be healthy, we must learn to inhale the elements that give us life, grow us and encourage us onward. Tandemly, exhaling all that doesn't. It is give and take; being filled up in order to pour out. Just maybe, one reason good stories remind us to breathe, is that they fill us with a newness and give a desire to share it with others.