Breath and Words

Have you ever caught yourself holding your breath? You were focused or worried, and all of a sudden, you take a huge breath in and realize you hadn’t been breathing.

I find myself catching my breath often, lately, coming back to myself with a start and an expansion. I’ve realized that I do this for silly reasons, like trying to find a mistake in a spreadsheet or focusing on traffic, but also when I am truly anxious or frustrated. I tighten up, my breath is shallow, and my body and brain are less oxygenated.

I began to practice yoga a couple of years ago, and one of the primary benefits is truly learning to breathe, to connect my body to my breath, filling up with it. The breath is life itself, and we must keep taking it in and giving it back.

I came across a profound quote recently that mirrored this give and take for my intellectual life. “Reading is like breathing in; writing is like breathing out."(1) We breathe in places we’ve never seen, people we’ve never met, perspectives that may be foreign to us, ideas we’d never thought of, and we breathe out our own perspectives, imagination, and applications.

When I get stuck on my writing, or when I find it hard to come up with the right word in a conversation, I often realize that I haven’t been “breathing in” - I haven’t been reading. My intellect is being starved of its life-giving element. So I take a big gasp of Madeleiene L’Engle or Michio Kaku, and I start to feel more myself again.

It’s an unfortunate byproduct of our driven lifestyle that reading is considered a frivolous time-waster. We feel that we should be “doing something productive” and that to sit and read, though a luxury to be desired, should be the last priority. Continuing our analogy, however, doing so is like trying to exhale without having any air in your lungs.

The author, critic, and essayist Francine Prose wrote a fascinating, if somewhat intimidating, book called Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them. She points out “the seemingly obvious but underappreciated fact that language is the medium we use in much the same way a composer uses notes, the way a painter uses paint. I realize it may seem obvious, but it’s surprising how easily we lose sight of the fact that words are the raw material out of which literature is crafted.”

If we aren’t reading, we aren’t giving ourselves the raw material of thought, whether we mean to write or merely have an informed conversation. For a writer it is even more critical to gather the finest raw materials, studying the masters of the craft. In an era of Bookstagram and Booktok popularity-based publication, it may take some false starts and abandoned books to find those which will feed our minds.

The corollary of (good) writing requires (good) reading is that writing is a natural and inescapable outgrowth of reading. A good story well written kindles a desire to create our own story, or to continue the narrative - what happens in “happily ever after” anyway?

Those of us who are committed to writing as a vocation, who have notebooks tucked away or a computer full of half-finished files, often feel harried by our own passion. We must hurry to finish this manuscript, or we must be sure to get out so many words every day; or perhaps, must we be able to say we did our writing so that we can continue to call ourselves writers?

Without breathing in, we cannot breathe out. Our writing will suffocate without the fresh oxygen of prose and poetry, and our intellectual life will stagnate without new thoughts and perspectives.

Take the time today to breathe, both literally and figuratively. Remind yourself that reading is as important as getting words on the page, maybe even more so. Give yourself some grace and some raw material to fuel the next flash of inspiration.

(1) Allyn, Pam. “Reading Is Like Breathing In; Writing Is Like Breathing Out,” International Literary Association. July 16, 2015. https://www.literacyworldwide.org/blog/literacy-now/2015/07/16/reading-is-like-breathing-in-writing-is-like-breathing-out