swimming

As Democritus said so simply many centuries ago: “Water can be both good and bad, useful and dangerous. To the danger, however, a remedy has been found: learning to swim.”

This is our tao, our method, our way. Scientists have sent rockets to the moon, but they are at a loss to definitively say how our bodies are sent to the other side of the pool. How could we, therefore, come to any other conclusion than that this aspect of propulsion is one of the critical, separating factors in our amazing sport?

The real way not to drown is to let go of the idea that there’s an outside and an inside. It’s to not panic. We know this; we learn it in swimming lessons from the time we’re kids. The way to stay afloat is not to swim harder against the current that’s pulling you, the regrets that haunt you, the fantasies that consume you. It’s to simply be here,

If you can’t swim in it, canoe across it. Find a way to connect to it. When the lake is too ruined to swim or to eat from it, then that’s where the healing ceremonies come in, because you can still do ceremonies with it.

But the cold shock of the water had jolted him awake as soon as it hit his body as surely as if it had been a defibrillator.

We can be good swimmers, but can we be a river and experience the fears and hopes of a river?