The first time I took a CPR course was in high school. I can't remember why we had to do it but I remember being snotty about having to breathe into a mannequin's mouth, pressured to do all I could to save a plastic torso from the world hereafter. At sixteen, I barely cared about anyone besides myself and a fake choking and drowning germ magnet was no exception. I rolled my eyes, breathed new life and a new mutation of the latest flu bug into the plastic mouth on the floor at my feet, and passed the course.
Thankfully, the only time I've ever needed to use any knowledge from that course was when Katie was about a year old. She was perched in her high chair, chewing on a piece of meat from dinner when it suddenly became lodged in her throat. Not before long the food got loose and she proceeded to throw up her entire meal all over the floor at the dinner table.
There's something that has stuck with me, though, for all these years and that is the fact that when a person is choking, their first instinct is to get up from the table and isolate themselves and that we as observers should never let them wander off alone because it's in these moments that they often choke to death. And what I've also noticed is that when people suffer, like when we are emotionally hurting, we do the exact same thing as the choker at the dinner table. We go off on our own, work at the hurt that is lodged in our hearts until we can breathe freely enough to function and then we return to society.
But you know what? It's a good idea for us to not wander off too far, just in case we have a hard time breathing on our own. We don't need to be superheros, all the time. Sometimes we need a little extra oxygen to help dislodge the slice of life that's strangling us, and that's a lifesaver, too. But hopefully without the throw-up.
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