The Practice
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In December I started a six session swim class.
My usual practice is something known as "adult exercise" (gentle exercise in a pool with about 50 elders), and between April-December, Aquafit, which is essentially aqua aerobics, which I've written about elsewhere.
I learned how to swim when I was about three. One of my most vivid memories is the test I had to take: floating calmly on my back with a small rubber duck on my belly across the pool. Now, that's not exactly swimming. What I learned was how not to drown. For the rest of my life since then I can "swim"--which is to say, I can tread water, I can keep from drowning. I've swum in plenty of deep ends in pools and in the ocean on many occasions. And still: I enrolled in a swim class.
The idea was to learn strokes so I could confidently attend lap swims and not just tread water or haphazardly fling my limbs around in a motion of swimming. The lap swimmers always look so intense to me, disguised with their swim caps and goggles--one person has a snorkel and I'm intrigued by that--another has a full-on white mask with eyeholes and a mouth hole and long white gloves, elbow to fingers. The idea was also to force myself to show up to the pool, at 9am, twice per week for three weeks, in December.
To my instructor, a young man with no need for goggles or layers or earplugs, I was a beginner. So we began with the very first steps.
There was the warm-up, the practice of putting my face in the water completely, then practicing the turn that would allow me to breathe before turning back over. Back and forth. Then we added arms. With every session another building block added.
For the first three sessions I was tired midway across the pool and had to pause. By the end of the sessions my stamina had noticeably increased and I was getting all the way across.
I forgot anyone outside of myself even as I saw, underwater, the bodies of my fellow students or our dolphin-like instructor. My focus was mostly the blue bottom, the debris that looked blurry unless it floated right up to my view, microscopic to my astigmatic near-sighted eyes. Coming up for air I might look at the enormous digital numbers of the pool clocks--squinting to see--and the time would go by magically fast.
My handwritten writing practice of two to four pages per session feels like when I have to step off into the cold water. The air is cold, the water warmer in the winter months, so warm that with numerous bodies in it it practically steams.
I quickly got used to the practice, its warm-up and the feel of the water in my ears, my mouth, and nose, after years of mostly keeping my head above water as often as I could, mainly trying to keep my glasses on. I was a learner again, with an instructor decades younger than me. As the sessions continued I noticed that it felt like I was doing it "right"--the motions becoming more fluid, the movements a muscle memory setting in.
Me, I'm baby. I'm beginner, I can tread water, I love pools, I love swimming. I've surfed, and the memory of surfing is that the hardest part was all the paddling and the stage I never achieved of being able to call waves in advance by sight. I introduced my own actual baby to a pool, an indoor one, thirteen years ago at the Hollywood YMCA--now she can dive and swim and not drown, too. How she clenched her body back then, a baby trying to keep her face out of the water, and I understand the instinct completely.
Now my face is down, in the water, counting breaths, arms straight with slight bend, my feet fluttering, pulling an arm to propel, turning over and breathing then turning back down towards the water, accepting that I will be submerged, all wet, a student, forever practicing.
Much like writing. Back to the infinite practice.