Sentimentality alert! You have been warned...
I've been getting back into swimming lately, as I signed up for the ocean
swim from Alcatraz to San Francisco in June. Swimming laps these last weeks has reawakened something in me. It has reconnected me with a feeling I had growing up, the feeling that I belong in the water, that I am more at home in the water than I am on land. I tried to analyze this feeling tonight, and I think it comes down to the fact that I am bodyless in the water- my body ceases to have the definition or distinction that it has on land. The water around me has more texture and weight than air, and so, as hokey as it sounds, I do become "one" with the water. I am no longer a mass surrounded by nothing, exposed and vulnerable on all sides. My body isn't conspicuous, and I am in a cocoon of fluidity.
Secondly, under water, all external noise falls away, and you begin to hear your heart beat, the air pass through your windpipe, the water rush past your ears. All you hear is YOU- YOUR body, YOUR thoughts. The busy-ness of the world cannot get to you. You can finally tune into yourself completely.
Which brings me to the third sensation: isolation. Swimming is not a team sport. It is a solitary meeting of yourself, a deeply personal sport. In the water, the rest of the world and its demands or expections fall away, and you are the sole voice that drives you forward. Underwater is one of the only places I feel completely at peace, because I know I cannot be intruded upon by the chaos of the world. Years ago, I wrote a poem, which I will spare you of now, but which began: "There was a time when I lived under water for a meeting of my mind, where light danced mottled between the shelf between four feet and the deep end of time..." I now remember what inspired those words, what I felt when I wrote them. Underwater, I do meet my own mind in a way I am incapable of in the ambient noise of dry land.
Finally, I feel I "know" the water in a way I don't know the world on land. I know how to move with it. I know how to move it. I know how to move in it. There is a symbiotic rhythm I find with the water. And again, I don't want to become too sentimental or cliche, but there is a sense of feeling that swimming is a dance with the water. A friend told me that breaststrokers are born and not bred. And I didn't tell him, but deep in my bones, I know this to be true. I am a breastroker, and I have always felt it's like a dance, known but not learned. As with swimming in general. I remember as a child, the day I found my "stride" in the water, and slipped into a rhythm where I no longer struggled against the water, but suddenly moved with it. It's an unteachable thing, swimming well. I see people in the pool, kicking hard and plowing forward, working frantically, sputtering and heaving, never understanding why others glide effortlessly past them like fish. They probably won't ever understand. It doesn't matter. I will be at the bottom of the pool, suspended in my element, immersed in my own world.
