Learning to Breathe

Wednesday night, I joined an audience of like-minded folks at Changing Hands Bookstore to listen to Alison Wright read from her newest book entitled Learning to Breathe. Alison is an international photo-journalist and in the year 2000, became a victim and survivor of a tremendous bus accident in the mountains of Laos. Alison survived the first hour - the golden hour - through concentrated breathing and meditation. Doctors say that given her severe and incredibly complicated injuries, she shouldn't have survived. 14 hours later, she finally received quality medical care. A year later, although told that she might not be able to walk again, Alison successfully climbed up Mount Kilimanjaro. What a story, don't you think?

Here's an excerpt, courtesy from Alison Wright's website (linked above).

The air was heavy and smelled thickly of burned rubber, of brakes and tires stretched beyond their limits ..In the distance, I could hear muffled voices calling, "My God, someone do something! This woman is bleeding to death!"

I silently prayed that someone would help whomever that woman was… I saw the deep arm-length gashes. The open flesh looked like it had been attacked by a shark, a dark wine color rapidly spreading across the front of the light blue sleeveless denim shirt… That’s when I realized that the woman they were talking about was me."

-- Taken from the opening of LEARNING TO BREATHE.

I was incredibly inspired by this lady standing in front of me. Here she was, nearly on her death bed, if not lying on it, deciding to live. Deciding to make it through, to keep on fighting, to keep on living. I'm not sure that I could have done it. I'm not sure that I could have made the decision to live after feeling a collapsed lung, shards of glass covering my body and being stuck in remote Laos.

What made Alison even more beautiful than her story of incredible courage and will-power was her calm and gentle spirit. She exuded a peace within her, even when recanting the memories of that awful afternoon, even when asking the audience, "why me?". What amazed me about Alison is that 8 years forward from her accident, she can very triumphantly tell you that that one afternoon changed her live in a way that she could never have fathomed - and it changed for the good. Alison learnt to never again take a breath for granted, to never doubt the power of the Universe to show her her personal pathway in life, to not rush through life - rather she learnt to live life one day at a time and appreciate it in a way that I probably haven't experienced as yet.

I couldn't help but buy Alison's book so that I could hopefully learn from her one-of-a-kind story. I often feel that I still have something big to learn - that a huge lesson is about to come my way. I sometimes feel like my feet are stuck in the Earth while life flies by in front of me in warp speed - or at least just too fast for me to truly see it's beauty. I constantly feel this need to slow things down, to create a larger purpose in life, to grow and nurture a peaceful energy within me....a need to learn how to breathe.