“If you do it right,” he said, “head into the water, manage your breathing, it becomes a meditation.” It was a passing comment in a tangentially related context so I didn’t stop him to tell him that I know. I know that swimming can be a meditation…even when you don’t do it right…
…which, generally speaking, I don’t. I barely remember not being able to swim, and I don’t remember ever not wanting to be in the water. Nevertheless, I am not a good swimmer. I am not fast, I am not strong. I’m still a heads-up swimmer. I never mastered front crawl. Somewhere I have a badge that says I can swim 800 metres, but that was a long time ago, and now I’m happy to put my foot down after 25m, before I turn around and do the next 25m. And the next.
At some stage, I might decide to get my head down more often, finesse the stroke, but for now that would be placing an obligation in the way of a need. I need to swim. Badly, is good enough. My slow and inelegant style is good enough. It propels me up and down the pool, giving me a reason to focus on my breathing, focus on a single number for the length of a length, and then the next one for the next length, keeping track, one, two, three…through to twenty (when I have quiet internal celebration ‘job done’)…on to the next and the next, until I think ‘enough’.
While my monkey-mind is dealing with the breathing thing, and the number thing, the rest of me is free to feel the water, look at the reflected light, relish the movement and momentum.
My point is this: it is generally accepted that there is no one right way to meditate. There is, therefore, no wrong way to do so. Swimming can be a meditation if you simply chose it to be. Or if you allow it to be. I didn’t choose swimming as a meditative activity; I simply noticed that it is.
It helps if there are not too many people in the pool, just as it helps to be sat in a Buddhist temple rather than a noisy train station for some other forms of meditation practice. It helps, but it isn’t necessary.
It can still be settling when you need to exercise the patience to deal with splashing children and people who use the pool as a place to chat rather than to swim, with the added benefits of practicing compassion for those getting in the way. Let be, let joy, let’s simply swim around them.
This last week I have been lucky. My swim lane has been more Lo Mantang than Liverpool Street.
On my second dip of the week, there were eight people in the water. Two fitness swimmers were speeding up and down the fast lane. A mother and her daughters were having fun in the shortened lane, that is roped off to allow the shallow-angle steps to be used with appropriate social distancing. One of the slow lanes had a gentleman powering the length and then taking a long recovery. I shared the other slow lane with another chap. Once we’d settled into it, and I’d let him swim through and waited to establish the gap, we more or less kept pace. The bliss was that for most of every length I had open water in front of me, and behind. No need to think about others, hold space, be respectful. I could simply settle into my own flow, my own rhythm. Stroke and breathe. Stroke and breathe.
I have a theory that sooner or later I will want to move on to the next stage, the refinement. Not now. Now I am just so grateful to be allowed into the water regularly. Now I am working on training my monkey mind to remember the number of the length, you’d be amazed how often I lose count. Now I am working on simply breathing in time with the stroke.
Now, I am also allowing my subconscious creative mind to absorb the colours that pool on the surface of the water. Red from the clocks, white and cream from the up-lighters and down-lighters on the walls. They start as glowing snakes the length of the water ahead, reaching towards me, but as I move forward, they retreat and scatter into puddles and huddles, rocked by the wash of passing swimmers in other lanes, inconstant, forming and reforming and dissolving, like molten gemstones, rubies and opals and pearls…and I wish I was allowed to bring my camera in here.
So there is one of the lessons: that not all moments can be captured. Some must be relished and then relinquished.
Another lesson is the value of the slow-stroke. Like most people, I have a tendency to kick off from the wall, taking the added impetus, to gain distance or speed. Occasionally though, I like to step away from the wall, and simply fall forward to be caught by the water, starting with a slow arm-stroke to create the initial forward movement before allowing the body to align more to the horizontal before kicking. It’s a calm falling into floating. Follow it through, slow, measured strokes, focus on the pull, and the flow, not the speed. Feel the forward movement and the lessening of effort.
It reminds me of the lie about the swan being all graceful on the surface but paddling like fury underneath. That isn’t how swans glide. They glide by slow, measured, powerful, paddles, as graceful below the water as above it. Strength and grace. I don’t claim either of those for myself, yet. I’m a big believer in that little word: yet. Slow-stroke swimming lets me feel what it might be like to be strong and graceful. After all, these things are all relative.
The other thing I love about slow-stroke swimming is that I feel more ‘at one’ with the water. Rather than fighting my way through it, I am allowing it to hold me, support me. And I get to the other end just the same.
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