A Short Set of Exercises and a Breath Taking Review

I am thinking about a set of exercises I do for my shoulder each day and about my lungs that help me breathe through the exercise.

The exercises were given to me by my physiotherapist, three times a day he said.

Today I decided to time myself during that short set. Together with the five minutes of a heating pad on the muscles after the exercises were done, the short set took 40 minutes – my fastest time ever. With that information, my mind makes a check mark against the question where has my time been going in the last few weeks?

While I bask in the feeling of the heat on newly forming muscles of my shoulder, I take a book review in the other hand: Michael J. Stephen’s wide-ranging book “Breath Taking: the Power, Fragility and Future of our Extraordinary Lungs” (East Atlantic Monthly Press).

This is my second time through this article, knowing that I am probably never going to get to read the book.

Further, I am not sure I will be able to remember the title of the book, but still the words in the review strike me deeply.

I underline the following: "With each of the roughly 20,000 breaths we take in a day, air travels through convoluted passages that can stretch for 1,500 miles to one of the approximately 500 million alveoli - - tiny, clustered air sacs – that each of our lungs holds”.

How could I have had a better morning?  Nor how could I take a deeper breath?

Arta