I grew up far from the sea or even a river or swimming pool, when swimming was the thin line between waving and drowning. Now that I am old, and after having spent almost a lifetime near the ocean, swimming to me has become a moving meditation, a way to escape, to breathe, to find peace in the chaos of life.
Which is why I enjoyed Roger Deakin's book "Waterlog", which puts into words my own feelings about water: "When you swim, you feel your body for what it mostly is — water — and it begins to move with the water around it ... The swimmer experiences the terror and the bliss of being born. So swimming is a rite of passage, a crossing of boundaries: the line of the shore, the bank of the river, the edge of the pool, the surface itself. When you enter the water, something like metamorphosis happens. Leaving behind the land, you go through the looking-glass surface and enter a new world, in which survival, not ambition or desire, is the dominant aim ... You are in nature, part and parcel of it, in a far more complete and intense way than on dry land, and your sense of the present is overwhelming." [page 3]
Perhaps our profound response to water appears to be our evolutionary inheritance — we came out of the ocean, of course, but never fully. As Roger Deakin writes: "We spent ten million years of the Pliocene era of world drought evolving into uprightness as semi-aquatic waders and swimmers in the sea shallows and on the beaches of Africa. We went through a sea change to become what we are, and our subsequent life on dry land is a relatively recent, short-lived affair. Apart from the proboscis monkey of Borneo, we are the only primate that regularly takes to the water for the sheer joy of it. We are also singularly hairless like dolphins and, alone amongst the primates, have a layer of subcutaneous fat analagous to the whale’s blubber, ideal for keeping warm in the water." [page 147]
There is something primordially powerful about immersing yourself into the water and propelling yourself into motion and silent thought, the daily bustle of the world left to the land. "As you swim," Anaïs Nin wrote in her beautiful meditation on leisure and the art of presence, "you are washed of all the excrescences of so-called civilization, which includes the incapacity to be happy under any circumstances."
Let these thoughts sink in when next you sink into the water. To me, the best thing about swimming is that water doesn't know how old you are!
