Breathe

Apparently you must must must breathe through your nose. NOT YOUR MOUTH!

I'm reading James Nestor's Breath, recommended by my friend Sarah. It is indeed fascinating. I've already become conscious of keeping my airways open and my mouth shut; I've started (again) using the sinus rinse and doing breathing exercises; I even went for a run and didn't breathe through my mouth at all, which was a revelation. Next step will be taping up my mouth at night to stop the snoring.

What I love about the book is that it has this anthropological biology stuff in it - like Daniel Lieberman's The Story of the Human Body and Vybarr Cregan-Reid's Primate Change. It's kind of depressing that all our much vaunted progress has made our bodies fall apart. We are hardly fit for purpose any more. We can't walk or breathe or see or hear properly. We are bent and blind and broken.

Makes me want to follow Henry David Thoreau into the wilderness. Though, wilderness my foot: he popped into town for coffee every five minutes and had visitors bringing his supplies. Hardly Bear Grylls.

Oh and I can breathe a little more freely as I have my third mark in the course of dreadeds. I'm hanging around in a respectable realm and, look, I don't know how much better I am capable of being, but where I am is, after all, OK.