Lovely Day

Every morning we get in the car and the kids ask me to put on “Lovely Day.” That’s nice all by itself.

But the fun part this week is why they want it. They want to sing along, and they want to hold the note as long as Bill does. Nobody holds the note as long as Bill does. I can’t, and I have been trying since long before they existed.

Withers was at his peak in 1977 when he cut that track, and it has sat in the back of my mind ever since a good friend played it for me in middle school off a burned CD, the two of us sharing headphones in the back of the gym, skipping class.

Same with a book I read around 2021, James Nestor’s Breath, which keeps surfacing at odd times. It surfaces when I’m teaching Etta box breathing to get her down at night. It surfaced when Wiley wanted to know how Kenny G plays for what seems like forever without stopping, which is circular breathing. It surfaces watching Beeya work out how to hold her breath long enough to get to the bottom of the pool and come back up with the diving toys. It surfaces every time I’m swimming laps and pushing on my carbon dioxide tolerance. And it surfaced again this week, sitting at a light with the kids going at it in the back.

Here’s the thing from that book I can’t shake. There’s a strange confluence of practices all over the world, arrived at by completely separate routes, that land on the same human experience.

In 2001 a bunch of Italian cardiologists, Bernardi and Sleight and some colleagues in Pavia and Florence, got twenty-three people in a room and wired them up and had them do a few different things: breathe normally, talk, breathe to a metronome at six per minute, say the Latin Ave Maria the way you’d say it in a rosary, and separately repeat a yoga mantra. Nobody told anybody how fast to say any of it. Both the prayer and the mantra dropped people to almost exactly six breaths a minute anyway, just from the shape of the words. Breathing got regular. Baroreflex sensitivity went up. The breath and the heartbeat locked onto each other. Their read, more or less, was that the rosary ended up in that exact form because that form felt good. The breath and the heartbeat walking into each other produces something you can feel, and that feeling is what kept people doing the work.

Then Nestor takes it further and lands on the symmetrical version of the same thing. 5.5 seconds in, 5.5 seconds out, 5.5 breaths a minute, about 5.5 liters of air. He calls it the perfect breath, which is a little much, but it stuck with me, so I guess the literary device did its job.

And the symmetry keeps turning up. Om Mani Padme Hum is about six seconds to chant with about six to inhale before you go again. Om in Hinduism and Jainism, the same. Sa Ta Na Ma in Kundalini. Japanese prayer, African prayer, Hawaiian, Native American, Taoist, Christian, all of it sitting in that same window. This was not a doctor’s recommendation that happened to propagate everywhere. This is either convergent evolution or something deeply true about one of the ways we are all human together.

So there I am at the light, not singing this time, thinking about my own 5.5 while the kids push toward the end of the song, where Withers holds a high E on the word day for a full eighteen seconds. Three perfect breaths, in and out, inside one line. Longest held note in any American Top 40 hit. No wonder they love it. It forces their breath to lock onto their heartbeat and it’s fun, and it is not a yoga mantra. I have not handed them the Ave Maria. But here they are getting the same thing that lined people up with their own breath for a few thousand years across most of the planet.

Good thing the light turned green, because somewhere in the precise math of that daydream I forgot to breathe.

That’s not the point.

Once they’ve got this one down and want a new challenge we’re moving to Bohemian Rhapsody, where Freddie gives you no room anywhere. Six minutes of hyperventilating in stop and go traffic. No idea what that does to a heartbeat but we will find out Monday. Bismilah, noooooooo, will not let him go.