Swimming

I’m back in the swimming pool. It’s another planet. It smells like blue, different tones of blue, like white, like glows. Pardon my synesthesia. It’s a strange place, if you think about it. A crossover between hospital and holidays. Better not think about it too much. But how can you escape your thoughts in this strange planet? In the swimming pool, you’re locked in your head, inside that swimming cap, behind those swimming goggles. Feeling out-of-focus and slightly ridiculous, not to say pathetic.

But then you go through the motions, in and out of the water, you do the moves, you concentrate on breathing, and everything just goes away. You let yourself go, and it’s like this weight you didn’t know was there gets lifted from your shoulders, from the top of your brain, from the bottom of your soul. Pardon my old-fashioned language. And you’re free. It lasts only a moment, some minutes maybe, but — yes. What is it?

Our bodies are intelligent in a totally different way. They have this other type of wisdom, and while they’re having their discussions with the water we might just end up realizing, wordlessly, that reality is continuous and fluid and that we’re part of some kind of totality. I don’t want to get too lyrical here, but swimming might be one of the most efficiently metaphorical actions a human body can perform. You move in a certain way and you’re a fish.

In the small sampling of my immediate family, there’s someone better than me in every swimming style. For this last year, I’ve been trying to reach the level of, what’s the word?, coolness, souplesse, zen-serenity my younger son shows while swimming crawl. I’ve been failing consistently. He gave me a couple of advices last summer and, since then, I’ve practiced, practiced, practiced. And, yet, I feel like I’m actually crawling under water while the world keeps passing me at high speed.

“Swimming” is a great word. It really evokes a body sliding through water: that “swi” sound, that double M, that gerund used as an infinitive. The Portuguese word for it is quite different. Nadar. It’s somewhat static and solid, maybe, but there’s an interesting openness to it. What I love about it, though, is that it makes one think of the Portuguese word for “nothing”: nada. Actually, when you conjugate the verb in the present, third person singular, it’s written exactly like “nothing” and it sounds exactly the same. So, if you say “he swims”, you’re also saying — literally, that is — “he nothing”. That’s how my younger son swims crawl: like it’s nothing. No apparent effort, no splashing, nothing. He simply slides through water. It looks so simple. Why on earth can’t I do it?

The other day I received some photos from a rehearsal. Everybody looked great, normal, except for this strange, bearded middle-aged man I couldn’t recognize. This puzzled character holding on to some pages like his life depended on it. What, that’s me?

(“No way, I’m twenty-three in here!”!”, says the old clown pointing at his increasingly bald head.)

Well, I guess that’s “this week’s lesson” for the author… Just do the moves. Don’t trust photographs. Swim your way through. One day your body might just learn the trick, but you’ll never know. Because if that happens, instead of swimming, you’ll be nothinging. Pardon my English.