The Borrowed Breath

Why the present moment is the only one that was ever real

Some days I cannot breathe as well as other days. Seasonal allergies, mostly, and the day I cut the grass is always worse than the day after. Ten minutes of talking and my throat starts to close a little, and I sound like a man breathing through a straw, and I have to stop and clear my nose in a way that never looks good on camera. So on those days I do not record anything. I let the hundred hours of work waiting on me wait a little longer.

Breathing is just a natural part of being alive, and some days it is harder than others. A cold will stop you up. Pleurisy will make every inhale cost something. I have had bronchitis, and once nearly had pneumonia, and every time, breathing got tougher without stopping altogether. Heat makes it harder. Cool air makes it easier. None of that means I am dying. It means I am breathing, on that particular day, in that particular condition, and I have never once beaten myself up for the difficulty of it.

That observation goes somewhere specific. This whole business of being alive is a matter of breath, one after another, and only one thing is real at a time. What comes in with this breath is what is happening. What went out in the last one is already history. What might come in the breath after this one is not real yet, no matter how convincingly the mind rehearses it. So there is no good reason to measure the next breath against the last one, and there is no good reason to try living inside a breath that has not arrived. Doing that is a kind of limbo, and limbo is the right word for it, not as a metaphor but as a literal description of what the mind is doing when it drags one breath’s experience forward and projects it onto a breath that has not happened yet.

That projected gap, the space between what already occurred and what might occur, is where anxiety actually lives. It is a subconscious narrative built entirely out of fantasy, and fantasy can be terrifying, so terrifying that a person will sometimes choose the worst possible certainty over the discomfort of simply not knowing yet.

Here is the strange part, and I mean strange the way you mean it when something surprises you into a kind of wonder. Even while a person is sitting in that anxious gap, dreading whatever comes next, they are still not actually present with anything. They are present with the processing, not the moment. A couple sitting five feet apart on a couch can spend an hour in a long, dragging conversation that goes nowhere but frustration, and the whole time, neither one of them is really there. Both of them are living inside a borrowed breath from yesterday, shaped by fear of a breath that has not come yet from tomorrow. Neither breath is the one actually happening between them on that couch.

What if, instead, the two of them just watched something together, five feet apart, present with whatever unremarkable thing was in front of them. Or one of them picked up a book. That is not a lesser choice than the conversation. It might be the more honest one.

People want security instead, and I understand why. They want a vow, something solid enough to hold onto. But think about what a vow actually is. A word spoken inside a particular context, at a particular moment, under conditions that were true then and are not guaranteed to stay true. A promise has a context. A thought has a context. Contexts change, because people change, environments change, and even the weather changes, which is why so many of us end up living like a nervous forecaster, hedging every decision against a future we cannot actually see, dressing for every possible outcome at once because we refuse to trust the moment we are actually standing in.

No one actually lives well there. Hope will not fix it either, and help is not really the missing ingredient. What is missing is stillness, long enough to know, underneath everything, that things are okay right now. From that kind of stillness, a person can begin living in a way that is accountable without needing to perform accountability. They can hold other people to something honest, when the moment calls for it, without accusation and without needing to take anything back later.

I tell people this often. Unless you can go six months to a year without once thinking you want out of a relationship, you probably do not need to go anywhere. That is a general rule, not a rule for danger or abuse, which are their own category entirely and deserve their own response. But for the ordinary ache of a hard season, patience with the actual present moment will tell you more than any fear of the next one ever could.

An institute for the self that was always there. Copyright The Autonomy Commission and James H. Tippins.