Every Breath You Take Is Loaded With Meaning

ON BREATHING: Care in a Time of Catastrophe, by Jamieson Webster

“Focus on your breath”: Those four little words have become familiar shorthand for staying grounded during troubled times.

But as the psychoanalyst Jamieson Webster suggests in her roving and philosophical new book, the fashion for treating breath as a self-care commodity — “a means of curing 21st-century alienation” — reflects a profoundly limited sense of what breathing entails. We do not breathe as isolated individuals, hermetically sealed off from everyone else.

In “On Breathing,” Webster offers a more expansive description: respiration as an act that, through the air we share, connects us to others. She points to how the pandemic brought this connection to the fore: “Never had we been forced to confront the stark opposition between the pursuit of individual freedom as America has so gloriously and so vainly defined it and the reality of nine billion inhabitants living and breathing in a shared atmosphere.”

Of course, confronting this fact is one thing; what we do with it is another. A question running through Webster’s book is why such obvious reminders of our shared vulnerability — whether because of Covid or climate change — have yielded so little by way of solidarity.

It’s a measure of the meanness of our political moment that people are turning inward, insisting on their right to endanger others while (ostensibly) protecting their own. A recent story about the current measles outbreak in Texas features a mother explaining her refusal to vaccinate her children in the starkest terms: “We’re not going to harm our children or [risk] the potential to harm our children so that we can save yours.”