Crista taught the Bikram class today. Mark usually teaches on Saturday and Monday. He must be out of town. I haven’t been in her class for a long time. She didn’t say anything, but I wondered if she thought I was worse or better since the last time she saw me work.
After class, I spoke to Heather about this book I was reading on breathing. It is a technical book for professionals that Kim, my chiropractor, recommended – not to me but another client. She wound up telling me about it because she confused me with the other client.
In the introduction, it speaks about the impact of breathing on health. I always thought it was critical. While I now know that I don’t use the best breathing muscles, I have always been a deep breather. It always worried me that Mike took one and a half to two breaths to my one. He was also a mouth breather during the day. He said he couldn’t breathe through his nose. However, when he slept, his mouth was shut, so he must have been breathing through his nose. Mouth breathing and rapid breathing cause high blood pressure. They trigger a flight/fight pattern in the body, which causes continuous negative stress and high blood pressure. The doctors believe his kidney disease was caused by high blood pressure.
Also, his breathing pattern caused continual anxiety. The only cause for his pancreatitis, which killed him, the doctors could find was his anti-depression medication. I always worried about his breathing when he was alive. I resigned myself to the consequences of his habits because he was not open to change. He thought my theories were a little out there. No doctor told him his breathing was a problem and sent him to a respiratory therapist. My guess in the next ten years we will see more doctors doing that. Now we need more people to train as respiratory therapists to help healthy people learn to breathe better, which will prevent a boatload of diseases.
Today I took the old sheets off the bed and washed them. When I came home from Oahu, I swore I wouldn’t change the sheets for a year. These were the last sheets Mike had slept on. I would still have some part of him in bed with me. They were filthy, but they hadn’t caused any skin problems, so I was still good.
In preparation for washing them, I sprayed them with Oxiclean stain spray and let them sit for a while still on the bed. I was going to have them in the washing machine and turn it on just before I left the house for Bikram. The linens were in, the soap was in, the machine was set for a soak, and I was going to turn it on as I left the house for Bikram. Naturally, I forgot. I called Yvette and asked her to run up and push the on button. When I got home at 11, after making a stop at Ace Hardware to get more ant traps and Island Naturals to buy more pumpkin seeds and dried cranberries, the sheets had been soaked in that soup three and half hours. That should be enough. When I opened the washing machine, the sheets were wet, but they weren’t sitting in water. Is this what this machine considers soaking? Whatever it wound up being good enough. I ran the sheets through a whole wash cycle after adding soap. Then I hung them on the line. They looked pretty good.
Kathrin helped me make the bed with the freshly washed linens. I took the comforter off. We’re heading into the hottest, most humid months here on the island, August, September and half of October. Oh, misery. I set aside the comforter for cleaning and put on a lighter blanket. The bed looked pretty good. I liked the feeling I got looking at the freshly made bed. I don’t even know how to put the feeling I had into words. Maybe I feel this way each time we put on fresh linens.
Today was the five-month anniversary of Mike’s death. It was a good date to change those linens. I wrote this before: I decided to do it now because Mike asked me to. He wants me to get on with my life and let him get on with his death. I think I am getting on with my life, letting him go slowly. I am concerned that my holding on to him limits what he can do, holding him on earth instead of allowing him to move on. I started thinking that’s why people pray for their loved ones because it reminds them that they are gone and helping them release them to their deaths. Tricky, very tricky.
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Musings: I’m putting this separately so those who are not interested can choose not to read it.
In David Brooks’s book, The Road to Character, he selects extraordinary people who had to twist themselves into peculiar shapes to be who they were and accomplish extraordinary things. I suppose society needs people driven by intense neurotic feelings, maybe even self-hatred, so they are motivated to achieve great things. But what about the rest of us?
If character building is as Brooks describes it in his book, I’ll take a pass. I don’t want to live a tormented life. Been there done that. Although it didn’t drive me to accomplish what the people he writes about in his book accomplished.
The critical question is how the rest of us live morally driven lives without becoming extreme examples of self-sacrifice. Is he saying the only way to be moral is some extreme behavior or psychological state of mind? Can’t be. There are too many of us in the category of ‘ordinary.’ If all of us are incapable of having an ethical imagination, the human race is in deep, deep doo-doo.
I did find one incident of an ordinary person volunteering. Brooks spoke to this woman who volunteered in her community. She said she was too busy to volunteer; she listed all the things she had to do. On the list were several things she already did for the community. She didn’t think of them as doing volunteer work; they were just things that had to be done, and she did them. We need more people to write about for whom the moral life looks like the lives of ordinary people, people who live everyday lives and think of each moment in moral terms.
