Learning to breathe!

Books have taken me to all imaginable and unimaginable places, have transported me to present and past times, have given me ample pleasure and pains- still, I feel I have not travelled to all places, I have not seen enough of the antiquity , I have still many emotions to explore. Such is my connection with the books I read — they take me to a completely different world!

On one such occasion, I randomly picked up a book titled “Learning to Breathe,” with little thought behind it as to how it would turn. Something in the title intrigued me to give it a read.

“Life is not measured by the number of breadths we take, but by the moments that take our breaths away.” — Boyd Palmer

That is how the books starts, and that is how I knew I was going to read it- One page at a time, one breath at a time!

The book is by Alison Wright. She is a photojournalist working across the globe- from Laos to Tibet, Nepal to Australia, capturing stories of monks chanting prayers, of Tibetan children playing innocently. She narrates her story of how she was bit by wanderlust bug, and then, she never stopped at one place until she is met with a terrible accident. The accident leaves her with broken bones and wounded wings. While she used to live a life of spontaneity and fluidity, now she is bedridden and stagnant.

The book is divided into three parts:

Part 1: A dance with death
While travelling in a bus in Laos, the bus crashes into another bus. Her arm is stung with broken glasses, lungs filled with fluid, internal organs all messed up, and she unable to breathe. Miraculously she is alive! After hours of waiting and with no treatment, she is taken to a hospital in Thailand. There, she is treated for her injuries for weeks. Her friends and brother drops in to see her, be with her. She visits a monastery before leaving for California. She talks about spirituality and her accident — “I felt this accident happened for a reason, and as with every challenge, there was a lesson for me to learn from it “

Part 2: A hard road block
Life is full of suffering –and overcoming it — Helen Keller

Once in a condition to travel, she moves to California to be at her home ground. There while still recuperating, she decided what she has to do with her life. She decides two goals for herself — Climbing Kilimanjaro and scuba diving. Now, imagine someone who has been bedridden for weeks, unable to move her feet, has sutured appendages, an arm that gets operated upon as and when glass debris decides to make a painful appearance.

Her doctors warn her; ask her to accept her new life, and give up the dream of being her peripatetic self. She is determined, motivated and inspired to do what she has decided for herself. She completes the Kilimanjaro trek on her 40th birthday.

Part 3: Eventually, you have to come down from the mountains
“I had made it to the top of the mountain. Now, what about the bottom of the sea?”

On a quiet day on the islands of Zanzibar in Tanzania, on a day when everyone was still recovering from the New Year’s festivities, she gives her lungs a run for their money — she scuba dives, meanwhile, she resumes her journalism assignments. On one such assignment- she is sent to Thailand. She decides to meet everyone who had helped her while she was recovering including the Doctor, the nurses and the lorry man who drove her to Thailand from Laos. She truly states that the most difficult part of a mountainous trek is the descent.

She decides to complete her lifelong dream of circumambulating Mount Kailasha. “The Tibetan word kora means, “To circle around a sacred place.” For Tibetans, this pilgrimage refers to the passage from ignorance to enlightenment, from self-centeredness and materialist obsession to a deeper sense of relativity and connection of all living beings.

This book has captivated me to challenge myself, to explore the uncharted waters, and to take: One breath at a time, One Step at a time. In our lives, we may not have the Kilimanjaro trek, or the Zanzibar Scuba diving , but we will surely have our To-do-list which is waiting for us to cross it. On her 39th Birthday, our dear author decides to be on top of the world on her 40th birthday. There she is, 40 years young, on a mountain top as strong as her determination, as sublime as her attitude, and as free as the wind!!

Perhaps, one day, I will do my kora and remember about her and her mantra.