Swimming

I love to swim laps, and I have an almost perfect freestyle stroke which I taught myself after flunking the one and only swimming lesson class I ever took as a child. Why did I flunk? Because I wouldn't swim across the deep end. Why wouldn't I? It wasn't because I couldn't; it was because I was afraid. At that depth, I was absolutely positive there was something lurking at the bottom of the pool that would rise and eat me as I splashed my way across to the other side. Silly? Yes, now to the middle-aged me, but not to the five-year-old me. That me was 100 percent certain that I would be devoured. So, instead of flunking me and making me feel humiliated, why didn't the lifeguard instructor simply have me swim across the shallow end of the pool?

Anger at the injustice and stupidity of the one and only class I've ever flunked (even at the young age I was when it happened) flooded me, and I refused to ever take another swimming class. I can be extremely stubborn when I latch onto a cause, so my mother didn't press the issue with me, especially since I loved swimming and went often and eventually mastered many aspects of it on my own.

However, later as a teenager, I realized that in order to become a lifeguard and pool manager, I'd actually have to take another swimming class designed to teach me survival skills. The instructor I had was an intense man who was very demanding that we be able to swim all the strokes correctly, so once again I suffered humiliation at never having even tried a butterfly and looking like a total ass doing it, but eventually I got the hang of it enough to meet his exerting demands. The one stroke that I thought I was doing correctly prior to the class, though, was the breast stroke. Turns out I was totally wrong! He made me do that stroke hundreds of times outside of the water and then in the pool while he walked alongside yelling at me until my technique was near perfect.

Prior to that class I had always enjoyed swimming laps while doing the crawl stroke, or freestyle, but after that class I absolutely LOVED swimming laps and being able to integrate the various strokes I'd mastered from that domineering teacher. A lot of people think I'm strange because I simply love to swim laps. They see laps as boring and even as too difficult, but it's those two aspects that I love the most.

First of all, laps are not boring -- they are therapeutic and meditative. I go into a deep inner place that calms me as all I hear are my breathing and the muffled sounds that reach me through the water. I also concentrate completely on what my arms and legs are doing and timing my breaths to the movements, so for about an hour all my exterior worries and problems melt away.

As to lap swimming being difficult, it isn't once you master the strokes, but even then, it is the perfect exercise. It's also one I should do way more often, and then maybe I'd actually be in shape. If anything is difficult about lap swimming for me, it is appearing in public in a bathing suit! Ouch! Now that is what I call painful and difficult. Of course, if I did more laps more often, I wouldn't have that problem either. Hmmmm, something for me to think about, wouldn't you say?

Lap swimming is also a great metaphor for life because you almost literally swim in a circle (it's really a straight line, but you come back to where you start, so you get my drift, I hope). We all know the feeling of swimming and swimming and never really getting anywhere in our lives, and that is exactly how lap swimming works. I swim an hour and end up exactly where I started. Also, sometimes I like to go to the deep end and tread water for half an hour (no, I'm no longer scared of something rising from below to eat me -- should I be?), and we all know that sensation of paddling like crazy to keep our head above water either in our jobs or financially-speaking.

For me, the love I have for swimming and that I've always had despite that one embarrassing moment in the deep end of  a pool in Papillion, Nebraska when I was five shows that we can all rise above our failures because often our failures are not really failures at all.