Today I begin to learn to swim. I’m looking forward to being
in the water and achieving a feeling of weightlessness. I imagine this as the
closest I’ll ever get to learning how to fly. I think it will be a form of
exercise that I’ll look forward to doing and that someday I’ll snorkel in Thailand ,
watching brightly colored fish dart past me like moving flowers.
Thirty minutes for three months—six hours of lessons—once I
learn to float, I’ll have crossed a huge barrier. If it takes me the entire
three months, I will learn to trust that the water will hold me. It’s a cradle,
not a trap.
But this morning, I can’t think about that. All I want to
keep in mind is that I’m going to a pool where I’ll put on my swim suit and let
my body be bathed in water for half an hour. I want that on this dark and damp
morning.
I love the water. Watching it, being on it in a boat,
walking beside it—now I’ll learn to stretch that affinity so I can love being
in it, moving through it. I don’t care if I ever learn to dive. All I want is
to get in the water, poise myself to float, and then push my way into it. And I
want to enjoy doing that. I don’t want it to be a survival skill only. I want
to be a swimmer; I just don’t care if I’m a good one.
I’m fatter than I was when I tried this at sixteen, so I
should be more buoyant. And I’ve learned to trust situations that I never
dreamed of when I was a teenager. If I measure getting on a plane alone to work
in a country I’d never been before, for a man I’d never met, floating is no
more difficult than that. I did that. I can do this.
When I was six, I was given a bicycle for my birthday. A boy
I knew had just learned to ride by using training wheels and I was positive
that I would have them too. My father was adamant that I would learn without
them; I wobbled and fell a few times and then I became adamant that I would
never learn to ride a bicycle. Neighborhood children came to ride my bike while
I was more than content to let it rust in the backyard. I suppose eventually it
did.
Then I was hit with the dream of going to England ,
bicycling down country lanes, but of course there was an obvious flaw in that
plan. My little brother was ten and he took matters firmly in hand.
Our house was at the top of a high hill and the first slope
was all meadow, soft and forgiving. He perched me on his bicycle and sent me
down the hill, hollering, “Pedal! Pedal!”
The law of inertia took hold; in motion, I stayed that way and my body
took over. Without my thinking about it, I found that I could balance on two
wheels. I was elated; my little brother shrugged. “Anybody can ride a bike,” he
said, “Even you—see?”
I wish he were here to help me learn to swim.
The lesson he taught me is still clear, perhaps even more
than it was when I first learned it. My body isn’t special. It abides by the
same rules and has the same abilities as any other, just so long as my mind
doesn’t get in the way. This is something to hold in every cell of my skin when
I get in the water. Today I want to be out of my mind for half an hour.
So as I sit and drink my coffee, I think of water touching
me and soothing sore muscles. I think of water in my ears as being a superior
form of the earplugs I turn to every night before I go to sleep. I think of the
youtube clip of one of my dearest friends teaching his small daughter to swim.
I think of him swimming in the Andaman Sea
So many things that we all do unthinkingly are acts of faith—falling
in love, marrying, having a baby, riding in a car, getting on a plane—perilous
acts, every last one of them. There is nothing perilous about learning to
float. It was after all the natural state of every human being for nine months.
We were all small anemones, suspended in water, depending on a tube that
allowed us to grow. Probably the most difficult thing that any of us has ever
done is learning to breathe oxygen after being forced out of the water.
Today I'm going to go back.
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