A Change of Focus

What if you spent your entire life focused on merely one half of something.

A glass half full or empty. A half eaten Clif bar in your jersey pocket. Dirty dishes, but never the netity that follows. Noise or silence, obsessively. Happiness or sadness, only one worth experiencing.

There has to be dichotomy in our lives.

What's more, we have to look at the other side of the coin, the yin to the yang.

I've spent my life perpetually focusing on the inhale of my breath, and never noticing the importance of the exhale.

I think that's what the yogi and meditation instructor was working to teach us at Bonnaroo last year with his fire stoker breathing method, in which you create billows with your lungs by reaching your arms into the air.

All this time I've spent, my thirty-two years and some odd days, worried more about dragging in oxygen, than clearing out carbon dioxide. Rather than creating space for life-giving oxygen, I've been refusing to let go of the harmful chemicals.

I need to let go, to breathe out, to cleanse. To let go, to make space for the new. In breathing, in life. I need to expel to make space for life.