This writing is password protected.
息 — The Character for Breath
One exhausted night I simply let out one long breath. It was no special meditation technique. And yet after that single exhalation a strange calm arrived. There is science in this. Exhale slowly and the vagus nerve we met in the last chapter switches on, the heart slows, and the body receives the signal that it is now safe. We breathe tens of thousands of times a day and almost never notice the breath. Today I want us to look together at one character for that breath: 息, sik, to rest.
息 is made of 自 (self) and 心 (heart). But 自 was originally a pictograph of the nose. So the first meaning of 息 is breath: the heart rising and falling beneath the nose. Breath is a truly special thing — the one human act that is completed in every moment and at the same time needs no completion. Earlier we said this age is one robbed of completion. Finish a project and there is the next project; hit a metric and there is the next metric. Nothing ever ends. But breath is different. Each out-breath is a repetition of this is enough.
Here the deeper meaning of 息 is hidden: offspring (子息), increase, coming into being. It is the 息 of interest on a loan (利息) — principal increasing of itself as if breathing. Come to human beings, it becomes a child, 子息. But why should breath and child be the same character? It is not a coincidence.
Increase comes not from gripping but from giving out.
To bear a child is to give away what is one’s own. Parents subtract from their own body and time, and the next life is born. A seed bursts itself open to send up a shoot. Even interest does not accrue if you clutch the principal. It must be lent, sent out, to grow. 息 says it this way: the increase of life follows the principle not of the in-breath but of the out-breath. This is the perfect refutation of a life that only swells. Contrary to the belief that gripping makes us bigger, real growing comes from exhaling, from emptying, from subtracting.
But bearing a child is not the only form of giving out. Letting go is another. In the summer of 2022 my second son wound up his life in Korea and left for Canada. On the day I came back from the airport I wrote this.
Kihyun — the source of our joy and delight and equally the source of our worry and anxiety. Now he ends his life in Korea and begins a new one in Canada. Less worry and anger. But significantly less joy and happiness.— 2022, Facebook
The worry and the anger decreased. And the joy decreased markedly. This is the exact accounting a parent pays. Keep the child with you and worry and joy are both present; send the child away and worry and joy both diminish. You cannot take only one of the two. What I learned that day was that love is a profoundly inefficient business. If we calculated efficiency, no one would have children, and no one would let them go.
So it is right that the character 息 holds breath and child in one body. Breath and child alike spoil when held and live only when sent out. Keep air long inside the lungs and that is not storage but suffocation.
Seen this way, exhaling is a kind of small death. With every out-breath we release the air we had just been holding. And, remarkably, only because of that small death does the next breath come in. Scripture pictures the beginning of the human being this way: he breathed into the nostrils of the man formed from dust, and the man became a living being (Genesis 2:7). In Hebrew that breath is neshamah — breath and spirit at once. Just as the character 息 places the heart (心) beneath the nose (自), breath rises and falls at the place where body and spirit meet. And that breath was never mine to begin with; it was breathed in, that is, borrowed. All our lives we draw and release that borrowed breath, and one day, with a final exhalation, we return it whole. This is why the Korean expression for dying — sumeul geoduda, to gather up one’s breath — is exact. Life may be, in the end, the work of breathing a borrowed breath well and returning it well.
息 holds two faces in one body. One is cessation: to gather up one’s breath; a fire going out (熄). The other is begetting: child, 子息; propagation, 生息. Within one character, stopping and life stand together. This is profound. To stop is to beget. As the in-breath comes only because there was an out-breath, a beginning comes only because there was an ending.
What the person swelling toward a burst needs is not more effort. It is one long exhalation.
And where these two faces meet in full, the next character waits for us: 安息.
Notes for this chapter
Genesis 2:7 (neshamah) · Etymological readings of 息, 熄, 子息, 利息 · Gerritsen & Band (2018), Frontiers in Human Neuroscience 12:397 — slow exhalation and vagal activation