Countdown (5)

Most of the time we don’t think about it. Breathing just happens. We don’t consciously breathe. Just as we don’t consciously make our heart beat. We wake and breathe. We work and breathe. We sleep and breathe.

For some of us, though, breathing can become laborious. Our bodies struggle to get enough oxygen and breathing becomes a forceful action.

I know. As a child I suffered from asthma. A condition where the walls of the wind pipe, or trachea, become inflamed. The end result is that the trachea, which connects the lungs to the outside word, becomes narrower. The narrower the passageway, the more pressure is needed to force air through. So inhaling and exhaling require more of an effort. The muscles of the thorax become fatigued and the smallest of physical efforts becomes a chore.

I remember missing quite a lot of school days while at primary school.

Fortunately, as I grew older the asthma attacks became less frequent. I relished this new freedom. I began to look for every opportunity to run, cycle and swim.

As I got stronger I sought every possible chance to push my body farther. I used to challenge myself to stay under water longer with just one breath (for more about this see my post Dipping into Prose). I spent more time on the (bicycle) saddle. I rowed for my University. There wasn’t a challenge I wouldn’t accept.

The importance of breathing and clean air has not been lost on me. Children with asthma suffer much more in polluted cities. Perhaps that is why the first sonnet I ever wrote wasn’t about love or nature. It was a sonnet about the politics of clean air.

In my book Old & UnWise – A Haphazard Collection of Poetry and Thought there are one or two poems that touch on this subject.

Below you can find an excerpt of the poem The Boy Who Jigsaw Puzzles. It is one of the first poems in which I tackled the subject of asthma.

This blog is the fifth in a series of 30 leading up to my sixtieth birthday. Subscribe to my blog to keep up to date with my posts. And watch out for an important announcement I am going to make about the Electronic version of my book.

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