“One breath at a time”
I heard this phrase for the first time from Sharon Salzberg in a guided meditation. Instead of striving to be mindful for a certain amount of time, she instructed us to be aware just for one breath – “one breath at a time”. Its simplicity struck me. Just one breath. Just this moment in time. Then the next, and the next, and the next… but your mind doesn’t have to think about that. The next breath happens on its own.
I had the chance to put this into practice while walking to a first date. Leaving the house, my mind kept wandering off to a different person. I had a date with him on Friday – a nice dinner at a French restaurant inside a heated greenhouse (a pandemic-era innovation for socially-distanced dining) – and he has not texted me since. “What’s his deal?” my mind has been circling that question for the past couple days. I wanted to give today’s person a fair chance, though, and decided to be as present as I could during this walk in order to arrive with a clean slate. Remembering Sharon’s instructions, I rested my attention on just one breath – the breath that was happening right now – and, feeling its movement in my body, started to notice the things I saw around me – building, tree, traffic light – in the duration of that breath.
My mind has a particular definition of breathing: rhythmic, expanding-and-contracting, continuous bodily phenomenon. However, as I put my full attention on each breath, this mental labeling vanished. Time also vanished. There was only body moving, a slight variation in depth and shallowness with each breath, a slightly different combination of engaged muscles as I put one foot in front of the other and tilted my head to look this way and that. The visuals and sounds also changed moment-to-moment. An in-breath may have been accompanied by a storefront on the other side of the road, only to be replaced with the adjoining city hall and a car honking on the out-breath. A breath, then, is more than a breath: it is a doorway to the fullness of each moment, where conditions come together to create the building I pass by, this body that walks and breathes, and even the reason for my walking by that spot in the first place. Through the gateway of this one breath – as with this one building, flower, or passerby – there is everything else. And as the next breath comes, what the mind just labeled as “everything” shifts into a completely different moment – a completely new set of sights and sounds and sensations to be experienced.
In Japanese tea ceremony there is a famous phrase: 一期一会 (“ichi-go, ichi-e”). Literally translated as “one time, one meeting”, “for this time only”, or “once in a lifetime”, it calls to attention the impossibility of grasping onto each moment. Even with the same host, the same guests, and the same tearoom, each tea gathering changes with the seasons, the tools used, and the food and tea served. As each meeting is unique and fleeting, the encouragement is for one to experience it fully as it happens. Meeting one breath at a time on my walk, I realized that every moment we have in life is “once in a lifetime”.
It is this uniqueness of each moment that gives me hope, even as I am isolated in my apartment during the pandemic, working and socializing and even exercising in the same space everyday. One mindful breath reminds me that the universe right now is different from the universe in the previous moment, or that the date today might be different from the date from a week ago. Getting in touch with the always-fresh present allows me to wiggle loose from the contracting desperation for certainty, starting from the certainty of the label “breath” – as if every “breath” is the same!
Originally written February 2021
