Writing and “Respiration”

tyunglebower ♦ March 27, 2024 ♦ Leave a comment

People are built to breathe. Literally.

You’ve heard the old warning; a person can go two weeks without food if they have to. Two days without water at best. But two minutes without air. (Broad estimate, but it sounds better with all the twos.)

Nothing works without breathing. Allow me to be morbid for a moment when I mention that even if a person is dying from suffocation, their unconscious body will still go through the motions of breathing in its final moments, even if there is nothing to inhale.

In other words, people will attempt respirate reflexively even when hope is lost.

We can however hold our breath. People can make the conscious decision to pause their respiration, even if only for a very limited amount of time. And of someone fights off the urge to go back to breathing long enough to pass out? They start to breath the moment their lose consciousness. (One reason that wise parents never did/do fall for tantrums involving breath-holding; it literally cannot cause permanent damage to the brat in question. The body and brain will not allow it.)

Enough with the macabre extremes, though.

People can hold their breath for safe controlled periods of time as well, most often for the purposes of swimming.

Adept swimming is basically founded on knowing the best times to breathe, and to choose to stop breathing, with minimal pain and maximum effect. Swimming well is about knowing the need to breath will always be there, but having the intelligence, the bodily awareness to manipulate the unavoidable need for respiration to one’s advantage.

Only a deranged person would attempt to swim with the assumption they can dismiss altogether the need to breathe.

It makes a solid analogy for writing.

Writers must swim. Some will merely bob around in the family pool. On the other side, there are the elite: the Micheal Phelps types. Most fall in between. Except the writer’s unavoidable reflex is not breathing in this case, but validation.

I opine that virtually every writer that produces more than a private diary at some point at least wants some validation that their work is appreciated. More than 99% of writers likely want to impact and/or influence a readership of some size. The desire is not going to go away anymore than the need for breath.

Yet it’s vital that we acknowledge this, and train ourselves to “swim.” That is to say, habituate the conscious choice to create written work while suspending our natural desire for validation for as long as we can before admitting in, immersing ourselves in it a while, and then drawing another breath to continue the swim.

The problem is that validation for any given writer is far less abundant than the air we all breathe. The good news is unlike the air we breathe, we can suspend this reflex for extended periods of time under many more circumstances.

Gills, as it were, would be wondrous. To swim under the water for as long as we wanted without coming to the surface for air. Just as writing would take on a whole new meaning for most of us if we never once had to face to innate desire to have people enjoy our work. That too would be a powerful paradigm shift in the world. A handful reach this magnanimous relationship with the reading world, no doubt.

Also no doubt? I am not one of those elites. I do have to acknowledge my desire for people to enjoy and appreciate what I create. I do have to accept that thus far very few people choose to do so.

Yet I remain a pretty decent swimmer for the time being.