But I'm also my body
Last week, I wrote about how I am my mind. I wrote about how I value my thoughts, feelings, ideas -- the head in a jar parts of me -- more highly than I value the rest of me. But I wrote that newsletter primarily as a preamble to this one.
Because I wanted to write about how, recently, the times that I've felt best are actually times when I've been in my body. Now, obviously, I'm always in my body, but I mean times when I've felt connected to and grounded in my physical self. Times when I am decidedly not (just) my mind -- when my thoughts, feelings, ideas aren't the most meaningful thing about me -- and, instead, I'm really present physically.
A lot of these experiences happened in Grunewald, the forest in southwestern Berlin where I rode my bike regularly for the first half of the year. (When we moved apartments in July, we moved farther away from the forest and I haven't found a new place to ride my bike yet.) I ride a single-speed bike and sometimes there's only room for the physicality of it -- all I can do is stand up from my seat and keep pumping my legs until I make it up a hill.
In addition to biking, I also went swimming in Grunewald, with E, on the summer solstice. It was such a lovely experience that I wrote a blog post about it and about what swimming means to me.
Swimming is actually what inspired me to write this issue of the newsletter about being present in my body. Because when I was in Rhode Island with my mom, I got to go swimming in the Atlantic Ocean three times, and it felt incredible. The best time was at East Matunuck State Beach, 45-minutes away from where my mom lives now, but just a 10-minute drive from where I grew up.
It was two days after I missed my flight home to Berlin and so it felt like swimming on borrowed time. I hadn't expected to get another beach day and so I was determined to make the most of it. The air temperature was in the high seventies, but there was a strong wind on the beach, which meant it was too cold for my mom to get in the water. A couple of minutes after we arrived, a bank of clouds hid the sun and I thought it might be too cold for me as well. But there was a strip of sunlight breaking through the clouds in the distance and it was drifting our way so I sat on my beach chair with goosebumps on my arms and legs and waited.
When that strip of sunlight arrived, I raced into the water, thinking I would just hop in and back out, just to say I'd gone swimming again, two days after the start of autumn. But the Atlantic Ocean is perfect in September, at least in Rhode Island. The water has had all summer to warm and so once you're in it, it's easy to stay there.
The surf was high that day and I spent a while diving through the waves, waiting until the last possible second and escaping into them before they crashed on me. Sometimes I dove deep and passed through the still water underneath the tumult, other times I felt the churning water lapping at my toes. When I was tired of playing in the waves, I headed back to shore and wrapped myself in a towel. Despite the wind, I didn't feel cold -- moving my body had warmed me from the inside out. My mom took a walk while I sat with our bags and enjoyed the feel of the sun on my face, just for a couple of minutes, until the cloud cover returned. I had timed my swim perfectly and it felt so good. I felt so good.
Calm and content. Pleased with my body and with the moment I was living in it.