Breathing, the movie.
(more or less as aired on All Things Considered December 3, 2003--not a transcript)

 

When I was younger, long before I decided to go to medical school, I wanted to become a film director. In college, I took classes in film and video production and analysis and history. Friends often asked me whether taking that kind of class ruined movies for me; they thought knowing the mechanisms of movie making would spoil the experience of escaping into the world of the film.

I knew what they meant. But I never found that I enjoyed movies less. In fact, during that time in my life I usually saw at least two movies in the theater each week. Often, I would walk to a nearby movie theater and just see whatever was playing next, whether it was a B-grade Hollywood cop movie or a slow ponderous European film. A nice shot of a city, or a clever twist in a genre formula, or an adventurous use of sound, all might excite me even in the midst of a totally insufferable film.

Probably any rigorous training changes the way you see the world. In the Vipassana Buddhist meditation tradition, as in many other meditative practices, one tries to simply focus on the physical fact of breathing fully in and out, as a way of living in the present. Before medical school, I took a class that taught this kind of meditation. As we sat and our minds inevitably wandered, our teacher would softly say, "Return to your breathing", meaning, return to simply feeling the breathing moving your body as a constant gentle physical fact. After that class, I thought about breathing in a new way: as a kind of center of daily experience, a source of calm.

Now, becoming a doctor, I also think about breathing as pushes and pulls of tissues and muscles and fluids, full of nuance. Not just air moving in and out, but the complex mechanics that move it, and the structure of the hemoglobin on a red blood cell picking up oxygen, and more than that too. And this is a new kind of awareness. It is like what I once knew about films, thinking, how'd they do that dolly shot? or, Nice L-cut. I am aware not only of the breath but also how it is made.

Just as in my film student days, it's not that I always understand it-in fact, at least as often I eventually realize that I've got another part of it wrong again, and I have to go back and relearn it. Medical school makes me see breathing differently not only because of my new understanding, but even more, because I know there are huge worlds of things to be understood, ever-finer levels of detail to struggle with and then finally, to know.

And so my friend's little boy is sitting on my lap listening to a story I'm reading him, and I feel his body moving with his breathing. Giving my friend a hug goodbye, I feel the movement of air moving in and her chest and belly pushing out, then falling back as air moves out. Ribs expanding and pulling the lungs out with them, and then the lung tissue pulling back. And in moments like this, I feel it or see it in someone else, and think about it for a second, and breathing becomes one of those sudden short moments where the filmmakers have done something beautiful and clever and I think, that's genius, and I think, I love this movie.

 

copyright 2003 joe wright