Hudson thought of himself as a fairly average guy. Not too tall; not too short. Brown hair, brown eyes. Near-sighted, but only slightly hunched over from too many hours in front of a laptop. A thin frame, with skinny arms and legs. A little bit of wiry muscle from karate. But also a slight belly, also from too many hours in front of a laptop, eating chips and soda.

So maybe he was a little bit below average. His boss certainly thought so.

“Hudson, I’m going to have to put you on a ‘pip.’” His boss was sitting behind his massive desk, arms behind his head and leaning back so far in his chair that Hudson was worried he might tip over.

“A ‘pip?’ What’s that?” Hudson asked. He had come into the office for once; he normally worked from home. All of his work was in spreadsheets, and not talking to people – the way he liked it – so he wasn’t really needed in the office very often. He didn’t even have a permanent desk. But his boss had told him to come in today.

“Performance Improvement Plan. P-I-P. Pip. You are not performing up to expectations for your role.”

Hudson was confused. He hadn’t heard anything negative about his work prior to this. Based on the comments from his team members, it was the exact opposite – he was doing a pretty good job.

“Huh?” Hudson managed to squeak out. “What do you mean?”

“Look, kid,” his boss said with a sigh. “You’re just not cutting it. We expect everyone here to hustle. Help each other out. Put in the effort needed for the company to succeed.”

“I’m putting in the work,” Hudson protested. “Just ask my team.”

“I see your team. Liam, Noah, Sam. They’re all here busting their butts everyday, putting in the effort. You know who I don’t see?” His boss paused for dramatic effect. “You. I didn’t see you putting together that pricing analysis last week the team presented to me. I took that upstairs and they loved it.”

Now Hudson was very confused. He had stayed up all night to complete that pricing analysis last Monday. That was his work his boss was talking about.

“You could learn a lot from the other members of your team, and I want to give you a chance. You’re new, just out of college, and still need to learn a lot, so here’s what we’re going to do. I want you in the office every day next week, sitting next to your team members and learning from them. We’ll check in at the end of the week and see how much progress you’ve made…”

Hudson’s confusion was slowly turning to anger. He stopped paying attention to what his boss was saying and focused instead on his breathing. In…hold it for four beats, out…hold it for four beats…

He needed to control his anger. From the time he was little, he had always had trouble with his emotions, and in particular, anger. The only things that helped were breathing exercises.

When it was five o’clock, Hudson packed up his stuff and started for the elevator. He saw his team – Noah, Liam, and Sam – all standing in the kitchen area around the coffee machine chatting with each other. Noah saw Hudson walking by and waved slightly, a smile on his face. When the elevator doors closed, Hudson could hear the three of them all burst out laughing.

Hudson didn’t know if they were laughing at him specifically, but it certainly felt like it. This job was his first job out of college and he wanted to do well and set himself up for a successful career. He didn’t have a lot of friends, and he’d spent a lot of time focusing on his work.

His work had clearly paid off – just not for him. His team members were clearly taking credit for the work that he’d been doing, and it burned.

Getting angry about it wasn’t going to help him. He needed to calm down, focus on his breathing, and figure out what to do later.

…..

Friday night passed. Saturday came and went. Sunday rolled around and Hudson was still angry.

His cat, Max, could tell he was angry. She tended to catch his moods, and she spent all day Saturday staring out the window of his second-floor studio apartment hissing at passersby.

The injustice of the situation bubbled in his stomach like acid, belching out thoughts of rage and revenge. More than anything else, Hudson hated the feeling of anger, and he hated that he couldn’t get rid of it. He tried playing video games; reading a book; and even playing some of his favorite Chopin sonatas on his electronic piano. Nothing seemed to work.

Playing the piano seemed to make it even worse; one small mistake and he was pounding the keys as hard as he could before he stopped.

He thought about seeing a therapist or talking to a friend. Growing up he’d seen a few therapists; one of the best ones had taught him some of the meditation and breathing techniques that were so helpful. But he didn’t feel like talking to someone would be helpful, and truth be told, he didn’t really have many close friends.

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He knew what he had to do: calm down enough so that he didn’t punch someone on Monday, and then just make sure his boss, Clarence, knew who was doing what going forward. Make sure he received credit for his own efforts. Easy enough.

Hudson was on the fence about going to his karate class that Sunday night. On the one hand, imagining his team members’ faces as the targets while practicing punches and kicks might be cathartic. On the other hand, he was worried that his anger would get the best of him and he’d hurt someone in the class.

He decided to go, but sit out if there was any sparring.

There was no sparring. Instead, they had a special guest – a fourth-level black belt named Chiang-sensei. She was an older woman – at least as old as Hudson’s mother – but quite possibly the most fit person in the entire dojo. She was thin and wiry, stacked with corded muscles, and sporting a short, spikey hair-do dyed completely green.

She provided feedback to the higher-level belts on their kata and fighting forms.

“Focus on your breathing,” she told Hudson as he ran through the seiunchin kata, one of the basic ones. “Feel it in your diaphragm, even lower in your belly. I want the taichi grannies next door to hear that kiai explode out of your gut.”

“Hah!” Hudson’s kiai didn’t quite disturb the taichi practitioners in the next gym over, but he tried.

At the end of the class, Chiang-sensei led them all through a short meditation session. Hudson tried to focus on his breathing, but he was distracted. He was sitting lotus-style, next to Chiang-sensei, and could not understand her breathing.

Her breaths were so powerful they were literally moving the air around her.

The air wasn’t making any noise going in and out of her nostrils, but he could hear it fluttering on her clothes and even against his skin. She wasn’t very large, physically – no more than five foot six – but when she took a breath, it kept going and going. She had to have the lung capacity of six people.

Her technique was slightly different too. There was a pulse, or a stutter to it. A rhythm. He was on the verge of figuring out the pattern when the meditation session ended.

It might have been his imagination but he thought Chiang-sensei gave him a brief nod after everyone lined up to give a final bow before going home.

…..

That night after he got home from karate class, Hudson sat on the floor in the middle of his apartment. He had a thin pillow under him, and his legs were crossed in front. He pictured Chiang-sensei’s breathing patterns in his mind, and tried to replicate it.

He wasn’t sure why, but he was very fascinated by the pattern he had perceived. Maybe his mind was looking for something to distract itself from the anger he had been feeling all weekend. Or maybe there was something magical in the pattern itself, that drew in his focus and interest and commanded it to pay attention. Maybe his efforts to clear his mind and focus the past few days finally bore fruit.

But whatever the reason may be, Hudson focused deeply. In and out. The beating of his heart. The feeling of his blood rushing through his blood vessels. Those blood vessels constricting.

The air pulled through his nostrils, down his throat and into his lungs. The spaces between his ribs stretching and flexing to accommodate a greater volume. His chest squeezing that volume into a smaller space, down into his gut and deep into his diaphragm.

The condensed air, squeezed of its oxygen and forced back out of his mouth in a controlled gust, creating a vacuum that immediately kickstarted the process again. In and out, in and out, in a fierce, but controlled tempo. First his heart in sync with his lungs, then his circulatory system, blood vessels, and further into parts of his body that Hudson had no name for.

The night slowly slipped by unnoticed as Hudson figured out the breathing technique that Chiang-sensei had been performing. It took all of his focus to continue, but the technique was like an engine. Once he started that engine running, it didn’t want to stop.

At some point in the night, however, he did stop and immediately passed out on the floor. The sun was up and shining through the windows when Max, upset about not being fed on time, waltzed over to the prone figure of Hudson on the floor and pawed him a few times in the face.

“Miaooooooow.”

“Miaooow. Miaooow. Hsss.”

Finally a few scratches from his very irritated cat woke Hudson up.

“Wha…at is going on? Max?” Hudson sat up, on the floor, still very groggy. “Uggh, what’s that smell?”

There was a terrible smell in the room – somewhere between rotting cheese and vinegar. Hudson looked down and saw black streaks of sludge coating his pants and shirt. The terrible smell was coming from that strange black substance.

“Did you poop on me Max?” Hudson asked in a high-pitched voice. But it couldn’t have been cat poop. It smelled different, and there was far too much of it to have come out of one cat.

He quickly ran into the bathroom and got in the shower. He scrubbed and scrubbed to get the foul sludge off of him, puzzled the entire time about where it came from and why he had fallen asleep doing the breathing exercises last night.

He thought he might have breathed in too much and hyperventilated. He’d have to be more careful in the future – he wasn’t a fourth-degree blackbelt like that Chiang-sensei was. Maybe that breathing technique he copied wasn’t supposed to be used by brown belts like him during meditation. He might have figured out a special technique, but his body hadn’t been ready for it.

But hey, it had worked really well. He wasn’t angry about work any more. He was ready to go into the office this morning and do a good job. Show his boss how well he could do – and how well he had been performing.

The office. This morning. His cat waking him up.

He took a quick look at his phone and realized it was already 8:47am. He was going to be late!