Breathing!!

Life feels like a race. I know, I know the old cliche, however, as one begins to re-examine the simile, everything extended to the image of the race can in many respects apply to life. One of the fundamental components to any sporting activity is the aerobic and anaerobic functions of the body. One of the key elements of coaching any sport is strength, fitness and sustainability. My under 14 hockey boys know that in order to give a good performance in a hockey match, you need to be able to run for 50 minutes. That is the duration of the game. Key to this performance, the sports science guru who never greets me while skulking through the hallowed halls of our mutual institution would insist, is breathing.

Breathing is the subconscious, systematic intake of oxygen to sustain our bodily, muscular functions. It prevents amongst other things stitches and other forms of cramps. But, so often, we run our lives without stopping to breathe. We conduct our lives in accordance to the dictates of the pinball machine of society and we allow ourselves to be pushed here and there at the whim of others, not knowing that we control the ball. Sometimes we are forced to breathe, other times we stop willfully and take a few deep breaths and look up and take in the scenery.

Tonight, I sat on the veranda of my amazing mother's bungalow in a small coastal town on the outskirts of Cape Town, listening to the breeze in the reeds and the distant sounds of waves breaking on the shallow beach a couple of hundred metres away. The kids, the complete hatrick, were settling down onto Granny's double bed and for a few moments, we were allowed to breathe. I am sure that the other athletes were pushing past in their bid to pip one to the post, like the management guys who have given out schedules to be filled in stating how much you are currently undertaking, and how much more you feel that you could undertake in the next year. It reminds me of a mate of mine in sales who overshot his targets for the year (pre-recession) and those numbers became the new targets for the following year. Clearly no-one cares about oxygen deprivation in an institution that has seen a 36 year-old have a heart attack, curtesy, in part to the high trans-fat content of the tuckshop food, and in part to his own state of oxygen deprivation.

We live as perpetual asthmatics seldom remembering at the end of a lap to grasp onto the the reality outside of our fishbowl and take a few deep breaths, through the nose, down deep, permeating to the core to the AH!! YES! One of my mentors spoke this last weekend of writing down what you want your life to be like, defining as it were, your ideal self, and then begin to go there.

Don't tread water, but begin to swim, stroke by stroke, doing your best and remembering to breathe with each stroke, in the direction of your dreams. Look to the left, look to the right, look up and move.

Breathe.