Good Practice

On swimming and being.

I used to be a slow fish in a big pond, before the pandemic, when I swam at the university pool outflanked by the varsity swimmers in tiny pants who’d butterfly up and down its Olympic lengths while I did my diligent crawl, and when the world shut down, I missed everything. The morning light on my walk to the pool, the comforting smell of chlorine, the shock of the cool water, my wet towel hung to dry in my bedroom, which I left on the railing through most of 2020—a talisman, I thought, though it was more like a symbol of my obstinate belief that I might control the universe, the location of a ratty textile as magical thinking.

One day in 2021, I saw an illustration of an aquamarine oval, pool-blue, and I burst into tears with longing for my swimming routine, which had felt as essential to the rhythm of my life as breathing, all of which is to say that when the opportunity arose for me to get back in the pool, I jumped on it. Once a vast majority of my neighbours and I had been vaccinated, our local community centre began offering 45 minute lane-swims for ten dollars a pop, socially distanced, which meant that each swimmer had an entire lane to herself—abject luxury.

“If I can swim once a week this winter,” I wrote in a social media post that September, “I will be a very happy person,” except that it wasn’t long before the world had opened up, I’d bought a membership, and got to go swimming nearly every day, this outcome reminding me—for the first time in a few terrible and anxious years—that not everything turns out badly. And I’ve been swimming at the JCC ever since, a small pond, nothing Olympic-sized about it, where it turns out that I’m even a fast(ish) fish, because this pool has a demographic that skews elderly, and I’m in the minority of members who is not currently awaiting a hip replacement or recovering from one.

My small pond is subterranean, a wall of high west-facing windows with frosted glass looking out onto a parking lot, so that when I swim at late afternoon during wintertime, the sun just beginning its journey toward the horizon, the light sparkles through the water like magic—as if pool blue wasn’t magic enough. The water salted, the taste of the ocean on my lips, healing, eternal. I leap into the fast lane, goggles fastened, and sometimes I still get the lane to myself, the pleasure of swimming at my own pace, nobody hot on my tail or in my way.

But not all the time. Every day at the pool is different, and I tell myself that this is good for me, good practice for being alive. How I never know what to expect, whether the pool will be crowded or otherwise, if I may have misread the schedule and neglected to notice that a third of the pool will be occupied by a contingent of day-campers whose delighted screams echo off the room’s tiled surfaces. Will I end up trailing behind one of the flutter-board people who swim in strange contortions, like the woman who uses her board as a pillow, always so frustratingly sluggish? Or will I share a lane with the intimidating Australian woman, a former competitive swimmer, who tells me that she likes swimming with someone coming up behind her, the feeling that she’s being chased compelling her to go even faster? (She also informs me that, where she comes from, you let someone know they’re too slow for the fast lane with a most efficient toe pinch.)

The pool is unpredictability, closing sometimes for a handful of hours for routine maintenance, or other times for more than a week because somebody dropped glass on the deck and now the entire pool requires draining. The first time the latter occurred post-pandemic, the email I received from the JCC regarding the pool’s “indefinite closure” sent me reeling, my mind spiralling back to the trauma of March 2020 and months-long lockdowns, and it has been an education ever since to retrain my brain that not all troubles are necessarily a catastrophe.

But even when things go right, I still don’t know what I’m going to get. Will I be a fast fish or a slow fish (deserving of a toe pinch) on any given day? Because it’s true that you never can tell, and sometimes it’s me who is the wild card. Bursts of energy for no discernible reason rendering my strokes strong and mighty, or else a sleepless night that leaves me lagging. Every day at the pool, I am different too, which is something about fitness I didn’t expect, once upon a time imagining that I’d eventually reach a point where everything is only easy—and it turns out it wasn’t just fitness about which I was fooling myself toward this end. I am 45 years old, which is—if I get really lucky—smack dab in the middle of my lifetime, and I’m only now just beginning to realize that struggle is an intrinsic part of the design, that being a person is difficult, not because I’m doing it wrong, but because it’s a difficult thing to be a person.

But oh, the swimming helps, the solution to so many of my problems—back ache, anxiety, writers’ block, menstrual cramps, ennui, and general grumpiness. Swimming is so good for my body, and so good for my brain. There are people who swim with waterproof headphones, listening to music, podcasts, or audiobooks, and while the idea appeals to me—swimming laps is very boring—I will never pursue it, because swimming is the only time that I ever get to be really bored, when my mind is free to wander, to wonder, imagine and think. And considering the places where my mind has wandered serves to document my mental health recovery over the past few years, which began with me usually engaged in imaginary social media fights with right-wing ideologues whose obnoxious threads took up too much space in my head, those thoughts eventually replaced with lighter ones as I began to feel better, as I shifted my focus away from online places and focused on things in my immediate vicinity that were tangible and real. As I started to learn what it meant to feel my feelings, which I’d never really done before, back when what I’d taken for a kind of emotional fluency was actually just a lot of anxious thinking.

To feel one’s feelings is also to learn to live in one’s body, and I’m never more alive in my body than when I’m swimming. Conscious of my breath, that rare awareness that I am a creature with lungs (possibly a sign that I’m not be a fish after all? Surely not…). My heart’s pounding when I push myself to try to keep up with the intimidating Australian woman. The irritation of water trapped in my ears, stuck down channels in my head I didn’t even know I possessed. And just how good my muscles feel when my body has been worked, which is a sensation I only experience in the pool. (I started running for a brief period about a decade ago, but gave up one day after bursting into tears halfway around the perimeter of Queen’s Park because I just hated it so much.)

For a while, I was feeling pretty good about my swimming prowess, about being someone who hops into the fast lane as a reflex, about my self-taught flip-turns and the swimmers who’d pause at the end of the lane to let me pass. When people in the locker room would compliment my speed, I’d shrug off their praise, which wasn’t so hard to do, because I barely deserved it (see, I’m doing it now!), but obviously some of it went to my head. Because I began to think about levelling up, imagining a new affinity with those Varsity swimmers from years ago. The pool where I swim was offering a Masters Swim Class, and I thought it might be an interesting challenge, a way to go deeper into an activity I love so much already, so I signed up. The main requirement was that one be “a confident swimmer,” and I had become all that, and then some.

I was nervous, however, because I don’t take so many occasions to venture out of my comfort zone, but I even gave my trepidation a winning spin. “What a cool example I’m setting for my children,” I told myself, self-congratulating. “Bravery is just being scared, but doing it anyway.” And then my first class arrived, and I showed up on the deck, and everybody else in the pool that evening had swam competitively in another lifetime that was usually quite recent, my small pond transformed into a place I barely recognized, where warm-ups were scrawled on whiteboards in a language that might as well have been hieroglyphics. I was in so far over my head and newly aware that being expected to swim fast without stopping (with a coach on the deck yelling at me) would be something I’d hate as much as I hate running.

So I left. I even ran. Well, only back to the locker room, where I threw my dress back on over my bathing suit, grabbed my bag, and ran home still dripping from my pre-pool shower, amused, relieved, and feeling like the smallest fish, immeasurably humbled, which—from time to time—is actually a healthy thing to be.

It turns out that I like to set my own pace, which is fast or slow, depending on the day. And depending on my company as well, which is fairly diverse in terms of body types, and abilities, and age, none of which are ever great indicators of just how fast or slow a swimmer might be. My flippant comment above about hip replacements was unfair, because I’m regularly out-swam by swimmers much older than I am. And sometimes I’m the swimmer taking others by surprise, a middle-aged lady with a stocky frame, hardly the picture of an athlete, but there are so many ways to be an athlete when it comes to swimming. There are so many different ways to belong in our small pond, which was one not-terrible something I learned from my three minutes in Masters Swim.

From the writer Courtney R. Martin, I’ve learned about the concept of intellectual humility: “Humility is about being the right size in a given situation.” Martin writes, “When we feel small, scared, separate, lost, I think it puts us at risk for overcorrecting—becoming the loudest voice in the room or the most inflexible at the dinner table.” She tells the story of her least humble season, which (not coincidentally) was following a period during which she’d been especially insecure. She writes, “I felt like I knew nothing, so I wanted to feel like I knew everything. We humans are such creatures of pendulation.”

We really are such creatures. I think about how rarely in my life I’ve ever felt comfortably right-sized, intellectually or otherwise, instead pulled between the forces of ego and imposter syndrome, between too much and never enough, desperately clinging to one or the other, to the illusion of certainty as proof that I am a person who matters, as some kind of proof of my worth as a human being.

And it’s in the pool where I’m beginning to realize that it doesn’t always have to be this way. In the pool, where to be right-sized can mean so many different things based on so many different variables, and it’s never fixed, forever in flux. Sometimes I’m a big fish, and other times I’m definitely small (and slow). And it’s in the pool that I’m coming to terms with this fluidity, with the relative nature of hierarchical distinctions, with how foolish it would be to let something so random and ever-changing define my sense of who I am or of what my worth might be.

It's in the pool where I’m finally starting to understand what the point is, of both swimming and being alive, and that neither is a race. This point is to float, really, and just to keep moving. Cycles and circles, no real destination, except right here, right now.

Reference:

Intellectual humility and being in flux

---

My Latest Novel: