Swimming and Life

Hey all,

I tend to like sports. But mostly team sports like soccer and volleyball, or sports which require interaction with other players, be they teammates or opponents, like tennis and badminton. Swimming is different. Swimming, like running, requires a lot of personal motivation. It's not a game. It's not fun.

I have never been good at swimming. I can swim, but I can't swim fast, or for long periods of time. Sometimes I see people swimming at the speed they do and I wonder how they are able to sustain their breathing so well. It would be normal to attribute it to the fact that I simply have a pair of weak lungs. But a part of refuses to accept that. I don't want to accept that I was born to be inferior.

Swimming is such a psychologically challenging activity. Most of the time, I'm fighting against myself. One part of me just want to get out of the pool, dry myself, have a hot shower and just go on with my life. But another part of me forces me to continue swimming until I reach my target of 10 laps (or however many laps that I intended to swim for that day). The first part of me insists that I think about the freezing water and the vision of drowning and suffocating. At this point, the other part of me quickly change my thoughts to the proud achievement of reaching my goal. This constant struggle between wanting to leave and having to swim really saps my psychological strength sometimes.

 

The unpleasant vision of drowning

Occasionally, my inner conflicts become subdued, and that gives me a lot of time to think while being underwater. Staring at the boring far-reaching pool floor, I almost always relate swimming with life. Like swimming, life isn't easy. Sometimes, you feel like giving up. You just want to get out of the freezing pool, dry yourself, and have a hot shower. But you can't, because everybody will look badly at you. And also, in life, warmth and hot showers don't exist outside the pool. The only way to get yourself warm is to suffer, work hard, and hope for the best. You just got to keep swimming till you get warm.

Underwater, time seems to slow down by fractions. It feels as if you don't know where you're heading, nor can you ever know where you're heading; all you can do is just to keep going. Same goes for life. You just have to live life as it is everyday without knowing where exactly you're heading. You have a direction, but not a specific goal.

And like swimming, life feels like a slow process when you're swimming. A stroke of your arm after another. A kick of the leg after another. While you're doing this repetitive task, you ask yourself: when will this end? And while you're swimming, you just can't wait till you touch the other end of the pool. But once you've reached the end of it, only do you realise how much you have swam and how fast time has passed in life.