Waiting to...

I am sitting on the floor of my office. It is ridiculous to call it my office, really. I mean, there's a desk in here with a computer on it. In its drawers are files with Important Papers, and books of stamps. Next to the computer there is a phone that I can put on 'speaker' for conference calls, and sometimes I do.

Across the room there is a bookshelf filled with all sorts of books - from Tufte's The Visual Display of Quantitative Information to Bronte's Wuthering Heights, from Churchill's series A History of English Speaking Peoples (I've only read one of those) to Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude.

The walls are adorned with diplomas - mostly JBLs - with my lone MBA certificate among them.

But I never use this room. Instead I prefer to spend most of my day hunkered over my laptop at the kitchen counter. The kitchen is the heart of the house, is it not? I can be near my family (when they're here) from this perch. Also I can eat while I read and work!

So why am I in the office today? For one, it's not part of the rest of the main level's open floor plan. Its walls and french doors offer a sense of coziness that is lacking in the rest of the house. And why on the floor? Here on the floor, I am on the soft rug nestled among houseplants crowded along the room's south-facing windows. I am sitting in the sun on a winter's day.

From my vantage point, I can see the clouds gathering on the western horizon. I can see the back woods and the fields beyond them, still blanketed with snow. I see our corkscrew willow - JBL's favorite tree, I think - whipping around in the stiff breeze. It has started to take on 'shadow' as my friend Sarah calls it. It won't be long now until leaves appear on its delicate branches.

But I am not thinking about the impending season. I am thinking about breathing.

Any practitioner of yoga can tell you the understanding of your breath and its relationship to your body is the pathway to enlightenment. Any student of public speaking knows focused breathing can calm the run-away pulse. But it came to may attention today that breathing is not just a tool - rather, it is truly the one constant in your life, from birth to death.

In all aspects of our life, our breath is there to mirror our emotions. Great gasps accompany both the deepest laughter and sobbing cries. Calm, deep breathing is associated with peaceful sleep. Shallow, short breathing can follow inattention or the seemingly endless buzz of low-level anxiety. What sort of breathing to you use throughout the day?

It is my hope that breathing can not only mirror my emotions, but help conquer (if not at least smooth) them. My great nemesis, emotionally speaking, has always been my quick-fire, lightning-hot temper. Frustration and anger well up in me suddenly and sometimes unexpectedly, and only the torrent of harsh words or other demonstrated displeasure quenches the fire that emanates outward from my mid-section. This shower of fireworks deflects hurt or fear, shooting the blame far from my insides, scorching all nearby. Unlike my mother's eruptions that could simmer on for days, mine are often over quickly, leaving a fog of remorse and pain in their wake.

Can I really use my breath to stem the tide, to even-out the amplitudes of my reactions? Is it possible that a calm mind can then redirect the emotion so the intuitive self can reign and find safe harbor? Can breathing temper all, or will it simply mask the real issue - flaws that exist deep within?

I sit quietly in the waning afternoon light amongst oxygen-producing greenery and wonder. And breathe.