They say it is completely impossible to hum while holding your nose. Go on. Reach up there and pinch it, then try to hum a few bars. To hum, the air has to escape out of our noses. No air, no noise. No hum.
The air we draw in and out is essential to our lives. Breathing is universal to us humans. Habitual. Necessary. But most of the time, we don’t even think about it. Those good old lungs of ours allow us to breathe in that much needed air.
We breathe a lot. The average person draws in the equivalent of 13 pints of air every minute. Most of that is carbon dioxide. The air we take in is only 21 percent oxygen. From that, our bodies only need five percent, yet an extremely important five percent.
The lungs are the cool thing though. They are the only organ in our bodies to float in water, of all things. And this next fact is kind of gross, but cool. If the lungs were open flat, they would cover the entire size of a tennis court. That is some serious surface area.
Here’s another thing that is sort of gross. Seventy percent of our waste is eliminated through our lungs just by breathing. And here’s another disturbing thought. Humans exhale up to 17.5 milliliters of water per hour. That’s almost four teaspoons. Of water. Coming out of us. Per hour. Did I mention we expel our waste this way?
Okay, there is a lot to be said for those people who wear those little white masks.
This doesn’t even include sneezing which is another beast all its own. I’ve heard that sneezes can reach 100 mph. But the people at the Lung Institute only give them 10 mph. Whichever it is, those sneezes are expelling 100,000 germs into the air. I don’t know who did the counting on this, but, I don’t want their job.
Back to breathing. We need it, and we can’t go very long with out it. In fact, most humans can only hold their breath for 2 minutes. Although, there is a guy named Aleix Segura Vendrell. He’s a free diver from Spain. He holds the record at 24 minutes.
But humans compared to other mammals are lame. The elephant seal is capable of holding its breath for two hours. Also the sperm whale is up there, at 90 minutes. A bunch of aquatic mammals are long on air, but the one that surprised me is the not-so-aquatic sloth. I love the sloth. That little creature can hold its breath for 40 minutes. Dolphins, surprisingly, only ten minutes.
Sea turtles though, win the prize. Loggerhead sea turtles can be underwater for ten hours. But eventually, they come to the surface, to draw air. Like the rest of us.
Spiritual gurus say, “Remember to breathe.” My body, thankfully, takes on this task without my concentrating on it. Otherwise, because I get terribly distracted, I would be passing out all the time.
Our good bodies. Our good lungs. Finally, the right lung is larger than the left in humans. This is to accommodate the heart.
As well it should. In our every day, right along with good breathing, we should always accommodate the heart. Our hearts and heads might sometimes disagree, but our wise lungs make room for that heart.
And we should too. With every breath.
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“And now here is my secret, a very simple secret: It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.”
― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince
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“The heart has its reasons which reason knows not.”
― Blaise Pascal
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While you are proclaiming peace with your lips, be careful to have it even more fully in your heart.
— Francis of Assisi
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