NEXT MEETING: February 7, 2020

Making Waves is making soccer happen at Hilltop

We’ll hear what for some will be an introduction and for others an update about the Hilltop Soccer Field that has been proposed by the Making Waves Foundation.

ANNOUNCEMENTS

Pierre Thompson announced Richmond Rotary’s Centennial launching of Rotary’s Four-Way Test student essay contest for Richmond-area high school students. (Details this flyer.) The three essay finalists will be invited to present their essay and receive their reward as our club program on Friday, March 27. This program will coincide with a visit from student ambassadors from Richmond’s Sister City of Shimada, Japan.

April 4, 2020. If you haven’t done so already, please mark your calendar now. That’s the date of our our club’s Centennial Celebration. Here’s what we have planned. We’ve sent a Save the Date reminder to scores of longtime supporters of Richmond Rotary so plan to see some old friends and maybe make some new ones.

WELCOME

Jan Brown was out-of-town today so President-elect Stacey Street called the meeting to order. After an invocation to Consideration of Higher Things, and the Pledge of Allegiance, Stacey welcomed several guests and visitors from other clubs. We launched into Happy and Sad Dollars and, before any of us could settle into a postprandial sedation, Stacey introduced today’s speaker, Lisa Bowen, who shook us to attention with a startling finding. Read on.

PROGRAM

Ready for this one? People in the U.S. today are breathing about twice the volume of air than people did 75 years ago. We’re hyper-ventilating, declared breathing coach Lisa Bowen. This was determined through comparisons of control groups in medical research conducted over the decades. Hard to believe.

But Lisa, who beat her own asthma with a process called breathing retraining, had a more important point. In urban areas such as ours, the air is contaminated with heavy loads of particulate matter. If we make a conscious effort to breathe through our noses rather than our mouths, the cilia and mucous in our nasal passages can filter out a good deal of that PM. This prevents harmful impacts on our lungs, and therefore enables better oxygenation of our blood. We can remain healthier.

Lisa’s advice: Be mindful of your breathing and make a conscious effort to keep your mouth shut. (Yes, this will prove almost impossible for some of our members.) We should chew with our mouths closed (which our mothers always told us anyway) so we won’t be gulping air at the same time we’re swallowing. She had other tips but, possibly due to a shortage of oxygen to my brain, I’ve forgotten what they are. If you would like to learn more about defensive breathing, you may email Lisa Bowen.

-Nick Despota, Scribe for the Day