Breathing my way to happiness

I stand on a hotel balcony overlooking the Dead Sea. The mountains on the far shore that make the edge of Israel’s West Bank glow red in the early morning light. There is a slightly sulphurous smell in the air, but I breathe deeply regardless, before releasing a sigh of contentment.

I’ve done it.

Just three more days left in 2019 and somehow I have made it through the year that I thought would break me. The truly remarkable thing is that the opposite has happened.

A year ago I was facing a house move, divorce, starting a new full time job in an industry I didn’t understand, learning how to run a household on my own, being a single parent, managing the emotional well being of two teenage sons who had their world turned upside down while dealing with normal teen hormones, and struggling with my own loneliness and heartbreak for the future I’d lost.

This exact same day in 2018 I stood on the bank of the Swartkops River at my family home in South Africa, looking at the sun rise on different hills and took a similar deep breath. It was a mindful breath that filled my lungs and pumped energy-giving oxygen through my body. It was a strengthening breath. A calming breath. A ‘you can do this’ breath. And it was a breath I would return to time and again in 2019.

Like when I drove to my new job, listening to Mr Brightside by the Killers (my go to song) at full volume, wiping the tears of overwhelm off my face that I couldn’t show at home and I couldn’t show at work. Sometimes that breath would come out in ragged gasps, as I allowed myself to deeply feel all the emotions that had to be felt, because that’s the only way to recover.

Or the times that I needed to breathe to calm myself after losing my shit with teens who – being teens – failed to realise how exhausted their mother was while idly and innocently added to her thankless workload.

There were the deep breaths taken as I undertook work projects without any real confidence that what I was doing was right, or similar confidence boosting breaths before walking into a bar to meet a blind date, in an attempt to get out there again.

But there were also the moments my breath was taken away by the sheer love, generosity, kindness and support of friends and family. It was this steadfast reassurance and reminders to keep breathing and to ‘keep fucking going’ (the words engraved onto a bracelet given to me by one of these lovely friends) that got me through it all.

And all these breaths, taken one at a time, slowly transformed me. I gradually changed from feeling broken to strong. Tired, but confident. And here’s the real surprise: happy. Like genuinely happy. I actually liked the person I was for the first time in a long time.

Riding a camel in Jordan’s Wadi Rum on Boxing Day with the sun setting, wind whipping my hair around my face, laughing at the hilarity of trying to stay on the beast, my soul felt light. And I realised that what I was experiencing was complete joy and utter freedom, a lightness of spirit that a year ago I could never have dreamed possible.

2019 loomed dark and scary. But standing on a rock watching the sun rise over the desert just a couple of days ago, I revisited all that had happened in less than 365 days and I thought: you did good kid.

And then I thought about what I wanted for 2020. Four words spontaneously popped into my head: adventure, success, fun, happiness.

So I took a deep breath of the crisp early morning air, smiled to myself and quietly said: bring it on.