On Breathing

The air we breathe is our oxygen, the flavor of our food, our sense of place and memory. There is no more immersive medium to life than our air.  We breathe around 14,000 liters of air per day. By contrast we drink a few liters of water.  Our air needs to enter our lungs clean and wet. Cleaning and hydrating happens in our upper airways so long as they stay hydrated.  Keeping our airways hydrated used to be easy when we lived near the sea in humid and clean-air conditions as we did for most of human evolution. Today, our air is dry and dirty. That’s why we need airway hydration. Over the past 20 years I have had many ideas on the path to what I and those around me do today to make breathing clean air possible.