Life & Wisdom Quote by Sharon Olds

Olds reaches for dance because it’s one of the few arts where metaphor isn’t decorative; it’s anatomical. “Breathe deeply” isn’t a wellness slogan here, it’s technique, survival, and permission rolled into one. Dancers learn early that shallow breathing isn’t just limiting, it’s dangerous: it tightens the body, shortens the phrase, turns movement into strain. By porting that logic into “life,” Olds smuggles an ethic of expansion into a culture trained for contraction - to manage, to minimize, to get by on the smallest possible intake of feeling.

The phrase “more air than we usually take in” does a lot of quiet work. It suggests a default state of deprivation: not dramatic suffocation, but the everyday stinginess of modern self-control. Olds has spent a career writing poems that refuse that stinginess, insisting on the full lungful of experience: family history, sexuality, anger, tenderness, shame. The subtext is that the body knows what the mind edits out. If you can relearn breath, you can relearn capacity.

There’s also an implied chronology: “for many years I was aware…” Awareness precedes change; desire precedes mastery. Olds isn’t boasting about enlightenment, she’s admitting to a long apprenticeship in needing. The “metaphor” is almost an alibi, a way to talk about spiritual hunger without sounding pious. Dance gives her a concrete vocabulary for a larger claim: the self isn’t fixed, it’s trained, and it can be trained toward abundance.