Photo by terren in Virginia.

When I was a kid there was a story I used to hear a lot. It was a story about heaven and hell, and it went something like this:

There was a holy man who was caught up in a dream and taken on a tour of heaven and hell. In hell he found all the people sitting around a great big table laden with all kinds of food. Everyone had a big bowl of rice, and all kinds of delicious dishes were in the centre. But all the people were starving, because the chopsticks were too long to use and reached all the way to the other end of the table.

Next he was taken to heaven, where to his surprise he found the same thing. Again all the people were seated around a huge table laden with delectable goodies, and again the chopsticks reached all the way to the other end of the table. But all the people were fed, and all the people were happy. For there was one important difference: the people in heaven were feeding each other.

Great story, right?

Not to me.

According to the story, nobody in hell gets what they want. Everyone’s hungry and continually mocked by the presence of all the food on the table, which they simply can’t have. It’s obvious that this isn’t an optimal solution.

But I don’t like the way things are in heaven either. In heaven, according to the tale, everyone’s so dependent on everyone else that they’d be completely helpless without them. Everyone’s indebted to everyone else. And what if someone has an off day and just doesn’t feel like feeding other people? Not much choice in the matter there. I don’t think that does a whole lot for human dignity.

So whether in heaven or in hell, I’d take a third way. I’d be the guy working on breaking the chopsticks into more manageable sizes, so that everybody can feed themselves — with resources to spare. I’d make a world where nobody owes anything to anyone else. Empowering people to become more independent and self-reliant — that’s what a good parent does. That’s what a good teacher does. And that’s what I do.

When everyone can take care of themselves, amazing things can happen. Those who require less food can trade their surplus with those who want more — and now we’ve got an economy of goods and services going. It now becomes possible to fund expeditions beyond the table to look for more food and resources. Leaders can now organise unions and send delegations to the Powers that Be to negotiate improvements in living conditions. Skilled craftsmen now have time to fashion useful tools. This is all quite fanciful, of course. But one thing’s for sure: people are a lot more productive than they were before, and a lot more free to decide what to do with their time.

That’s what I believe in, and that’s what this site is about: liberation. About helping people to become increasingly empowered and free to decide what they want to do with their own lives. Especially here in Singapore, where people often find it hard to conceive of opportunities beyond the rat race and where living the dream can seem so very far away. Short of leaving the country altogether, this is what this site is about: finding a better way.

Photo by judhi.

Today I tried out a technique I learnt from Ravi Raman of sethigherstandards.com, applied to running: breathing through your nose.

Sounds weird, right? After all, when running our natural tendency is to breathe through the mouth — whether in through the nose and out through the mouth, as in swimming, or both in and out through the mouth. After all, the mouth is bigger than the nose, and should thus result in a greater supply of oxygen to the lungs… right?

Not according to Raman. Here’s what he has to say about it:

Breathing through your nose allows a smaller and more highly directed stream of air to flow deep into the lungs. As a result, according to Dr. Konstantine Buteyko (creator of the The Buteyko Breathing Technique), the carbon dioxide levels of your blood are able to stay at a more moderate and even level, and the oxygen is able to be efficiently absorbed into the bloodstream.

So I gave it a shot today, during a short, comfortable warmup run before a weight-training workout: ten minutes on the treadmill at 13.0 km/h, breathing exclusively through my nose.

It was rather uncomfortable! I actually found myself having to consciously keep my mouth shut in the later stages of the run, clamping on my lips in an effort to keep them closed.

But surprisingly enough I DID find a real improvement in overall energy levels during the run, and a measurably improved recovery time after. I think my heart rate returned to normal within about a minute, perhaps a minute and a half! That’s plenty impressive, at least for me.

Ten minutes at 13.0, of course, really isn’t very fast or far at all. I’ll try a few longer/faster runs using the same technique, and keep you guys posted.