SWIMMING

 

I saw this video via Swiss Miss not too long ago, and I have thought of it often these past few weeks. When I was cleared for exercise after surgery sometime in mid-September I did some light jogging to see if I could get back into running, but it doesn't seem to be a good fit right now - mysterious back or pelvic pressure happens the day after, I cannot abide running in the dark at 6 AM, and after work routines are no longer routines because of variable factors.  Instead, I decided to look into swimming.  I had been wanting this year to get pointers on my strokes - I know how to swim but never had lessons - so I signed up for six-session private lessons and they have been wonderful. 

My seasonal depression hit especially hard this year - who is to say why, maybe I will be able to, in hindsight - and I had deployed all my usual tactics to little avail. However, swimming was the thing that was definitively effective.  It was a ray of light in my fog haze.  And overall, I do feel that my winter equilibrium is kicking in now.  Hopefully, it stays.  My last lesson is tomorrow morning, but I've signed up for a membership at the local gym that has an indoor pool, so I plan to continue swimming through the winter. 

Last year, I had read a book called, "Why We Swim", by Bonnie Tsui, and while I agreed with the idea of swimming as meditation, and I was fascinated by our relationship as humans to water, it was hard to comprehend the idea of swimming long distances or doing laps over and over again. Being in the water does bring me this utter sense of calm. Everything is going to be okay. But I am also early enough at this - and recent enough from surgery - that I get winded swimming only a couple of laps. I have to take breaks between a lap or two, and I can do laps for 20 minutes at most right now, but that's okay. It feels so good when I'm done. I like to top it off with a few minutes in the sauna- heaven.  I have a ways to go before I can get to my goal of swimming a mile without stopping, but I'm looking forward to trying. 

Here are two excerpts from that book that I found notable for this post: 

For many swimmers, the act of swimming is a tonic, in that old-fashioned sense of the word: it is a restorative, a stimulant, undertaken for a feeling of vigor and well-being. The word tonic comes from the Greek tonikos, “of or for stretching.

Here she is quoting Kafka, who apparently was a swimmer: 

Franz Kafka observed that “the truth is always an abyss. One must—as in a swimming pool—dare to dive from the quivering springboard of trivial everyday experience and sink into the depths, in order later to rise again—laughing and fighting for breath—to the now doubly illuminated surface of things.

And some articles I came across recently: on where to find quiet this winter, cold water swimming, and learning how to swim at 68.