Do Not Look Around

My toes are curled over the lip of another pool on another early morning. I like to visit places by swimming there. I swim, in part, as a strange form of tourism: a glacier-fed lake in Yosemite’s high country, the arctic-fed ocean water off the coast of Oregon, the local pool. Some people sample food of a new locale; I encounter a place through its water. I swim, too, out of necessity. My back is a chronic problem and, stubbornly, I refuse dozens of people who have recommended to me yoga and pilates (forms of exercise sweeping the land) and stick to what I know, and what also is good for me: swimming. For purposes of health and tourism, I awake at 5:25 a.m., put on an undershirt, turtleneck, sweatshirt, and overcoat to protect my thin Los Angeles blood, and dutifully follow the woman’s instructions on my GPS from the Hampton Inn in Chicopee, Massachusetts to the Springfield JCC across town. I hang my many layers in the locker, pull on a suit and goggles, and, by 5:55 a.m., I am standing at the edge of another local pool. This one is typical of most JCC pools built in the 1960s and 70s, decorated in earth tones and small tiles. Standing at the water’s edge, I face the same small fear that I faced hundreds of mornings in my teens and early twenties: diving into water so much colder than the warm bed I got out of just minutes before.

I see a woman in the next lane but the pool is quite empty. I am happy I will have a lane to myself, that I am not in her lane. She is slow. Really slow, like to the point where, for a moment I, quite obnoxiously, think to myself, “My God, she’s doing breaststroke and going backwards!” With that unnecessarily smug and boastful thought having passed through my mind, I dive into the water and begin swimming.

I read a book a few months ago: The Way of the Peaceful Warrior by Dan Milman. A book influenced by various schools of Eastern philosophy, one of its main lessons is to teach you to focus on where you are and what you are doing. Not trying to be aware, but being aware of what you are doing and where you are. The book argues that the mind, which we treasure and think of as a gift, can also be a distraction from reality, a stumbling block to experiencing the present. The mind makes us anxious about the unknown future; it also makes us feel nostalgic for, or guilty about, the past. Memories of another place or another sensation are a gift but can be a hindrance too because rather than being where you are and doing what you’re doing, memories bring you, well, somewhere else. Since reading the book, my swimming has become a dance between contemplation and meditation.

Contemplation

Sometimes when I swim, I write in my head. Sermons. Articles. Sometimes, I think about my career, or my relationships with my wife and children. I value the pool as a space to think about things I care about—rather than thinking about the e-mails and distractions that consume so many of my thoughts. I swim, but, while I swim, I observe my day and develop insights about my life. When I swim, I also pass the time by thinking about swimming. For example, to keep track of how many lengths I’ve swum this morning, I swim my first 300 meters (it is a 25-meter pool, so 300 meters is 12 lengths; swimmers don’t measure their workout distances in number of times up and down a pool—you can tell whether someone was [or wasn’t] a competitive swimmer if they tell you they swam 80 lengths rather than 2,000 meters) by breathing once every three strokes for my first fifty meters, then once every five strokes for the next fifty, and then repeating the pattern through three times (3 × [50 + 50] = 300). Strange...