Until You Drown

Wildfires have been ravaging Canada recently, pummeling the northeast with smoke.

Air is a funny thing. An amorphous presence that wraps around us, sometimes gripping, more often lax, always there. And it turns out to be a surprisingly useful lens, one that sheds light on more domains of our lives than we’d guess.

The air in a room. Fondly referred to as the ‘vibe’, but air goes beyond that. It allows for a bit more range. Take a restaurant: you walk in and are suddenly flooded with a thousand different data points, most landing on your senses through the air. The hodgepodge of smells, the varied temperatures as you navigate the space, even the quality of the air itself as you inhale it. This is more than the just the vibe; it’s the atmosphere and your relationship with its entire solar system.

The more intimate the space, the more sensitive the air, the more fragile the atmosphere. Someone of a peculiar personality enters the space and you notice immediately — the air changes. Did the conversation speed up? Did people’s breathing change? Did the air tense? Did this person add oxygen to the room, relaxing everyone? Or was it stolen, making everyone wary and uneasy? Do you see people’s eyes glow, signaling their desire to sap the air from this new presence in the room?

The air tends to mirror the fragility of the space you inhabit, particularly somewhere like work. When a boss enters, the air changes, so the people change, and consequently the center of gravity shifts. This is why a (good) boss will leave the post-work social event after a certain hour. They know, whether they like it or not, that the air is just not the same with them in it.

The type of change and magnitude depend on the kind of leader who enters. A leader is responsible for commanding the air in the room, and it’s often our job to read it well. Notice the way people breathe and sit after a leader enters the space. Are lips pursed, breathing withdrawn and measured, as though drawing from an oxygen tank in short supply? Are mouths slightly open, revealing their calm and ease? Or is the breath pressured, panicked, greedy?

“He’s the only man I’ve ever met who makes his own gravity.” — Red Rising

Your personality has a relationship with air. Ayurveda (yoga's sister science) sorts us by the elements. Vata types are made of air: quick, creative, restless, forever in motion. Pitta is fire — intense, consuming, sharp. Kapha is earth and water — grounded, steady, slow to move. The ancient Greeks held a similar framework with their four temperaments and four elements.

Some people are entirely unmoored from the disciplined ground of reality. They float away, slaves to their own airy freedom. Others command the air like fire, consuming all attention and emotional space in a room.

“I didn’t know why, but something wasn’t right.” It’s no coincidence that there are thousands of ways to say this across thousands of cultures that have never crossed paths. Even when you’re not clocking it, the air (fragrance/smells, pheromones) someone gives off affects your reading of them — the air particles from the scent of their clothes, their breath, their sweat — often illegible but always evident.

These forest fires are a painful reminder of not just our effects on the air quality air, but the air’s own effects on us. Bad air quality causes several issues that we barely perceive day-to-day. Depending on how bad it is, it can worsen the spread of disease, influence people to commit more crimes, make us dumber, and (of course) kill us. Don’t even dare to look up the effects of burning candles and incense in your home.

As they say, every city whispers something to you — so does its air. Typically, the air quality reflects so much about a city: where it falls in its development lifecycle (Mumbai vs. London); where it sits in relation to its surroundings (forest fires); a certain sense of negligence (smells of trash, weed, clashing odors). And, of course, air quality can change block by block within the same city across a city. Air reflects wealth.

Air is in our language. Tokyo-based translator, Hiroko Yoda, describes it best in her post on explaining what defines Japanese national identity. There’s no better way to end than with her words:

“Anyone who’s studied Japanese will know what I mean. We often leave pronouns and even subjects out, in casual speech. You’re expected to kuuki wo yomu – “read the air” and intuit meaning. So when Japanese say they want immigrants to master Japanese, they’re talking less about the linguistics of speaking than they are context – “the air,” in other words.

As a Japanese, it isn’t my place to say who is or isn’t an American. But I can say what I personally envision for my country’s identity going forward. I see it in little moments all over the city today. Non-Japanese employees greeting customers in polite Japanese. Foreign folks showing respect at temples and shrines. The caucasian man and his daughter I saw commuting to kindergarten on a mama-chari bike, her tiny pastel backpack slung incongruously over his big shoulders. In other words, the stuff of everyday life. To me Japanese isn’t what you look like; it’s how you act. In other words, it’s how you read the air.”

Thanks for taking the Pack,

Zach

_{The vibe-killer disclaimer: The opinions in this post and all other posts only represent myself and do not represent the opinions of my employer or any groups I am a member of.
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