I don’t like fiddling with my clock radio, it’s set for 6:00 AM which is where I want it on the weekend. On weekdays I need to be up early to be in the swimming pool at 6:00 so I set my smart phone for 5:30. I am not very alert then but I have the routine down and it works. Today it wasn’t until I got to the community center that I noticed it was really dark and there were no cars in the parking lot. I checked my phone and it was 4:47. On the way to bed last night I missed the 5:30 toggle on my alarm setting by one notch, and there I was. I let the seat back, reset my phone and dozed off.
The transition in summer into the water is really simple; not much to take off, not much to put on, lock the locker, ear plugs in, set my kitchen timer at the end of my lane and step off into 9’ of calm water. This morning I was the first person in at 5:40, no one had made a ripple since the night before. The water was wall to wall, end to end, slick and smooth without a blemish. In the old days pools had gutters on the vertical side wall, several inches below the lip. Modern pools now have a horizontal gutter with a grate on the deck, just beyond the lip. This way the pool fills to the very top. Waves that wash up go over the top and down through the grate; there is no vertical surface to reflect waves or backwash back into the pool. It may not sound like much to folks who play in the water but swimmers appreciate it.
The feet first plunge to the bottom and the short ride back up is a refreshing, second stage part of the wake-up. I hang on the wall for a few seconds and service my goggles. If you don’t want them to fog up you lubricate them with something that does not condensate as easily as water. Body heat plus moisture equals condensation inside the lens. Saliva works very well so I spit in one lens and then the other, use my tongue like a brush to apply it evenly and seat them in place, push off the wall and follow the black line on the bottom of the pool. After several laps things begin to kick in, I think about my stroke; thumbs down on the catch, pull all the way through to the hips, kick all the way from the hips. Pretty soon the wake-up continues as you remember something from the other day or start connecting information and ideas in ways you hadn’t done before. I play with words, couplets, rhyme and verse, formatting songs that haven’t been written yet. I think about big questions, big ideas; why are we here? Are we on our own or are we in this together? One thing leads to another and before you know it the timer on the deck has gone off and my hour in the water is finished.
The way a person reconciles information with meaning can be quite different than that of their friends and contemporaries. I can’t think of a better way to get myself grounded and attentive than my morning swim. It’s sort of like meditation only it requires motion rather than pause. I am a visual, kinesthetic learner. I understand how that works now. When I was a kid, who’d a thunk, who cared? Everything was linear, verbal and quantitative. For me it was just words and they didn’t mean much if I couldn’t visualize the process. When I drummed my pencil or bobbed and wiggled in my chair, my teacher poked me and gave me the evil eye. Images and metaphors serve me well and I move as I must now that I'm the teacher.
In the water this morning I thought about a movie I saw recently, about some old people who went to India, to a dilapidated hotel where they all dealt with life’s decline and the disillusion that comes with it. They all had different situations but the specter of either poor health, loneliness or irrelevance had been thrust upon them. Two quotes from the movie stayed with me as I stroked my mile and a quarter this morning. The first was a young man who faced a seemingly hopeless confliction between the logic of tradition and his feelings. He said, “It will all work out in the end; and if it doesn’t, then it isn’t the end.” The other was by an elderly woman who had watched her cohorts as they all struggled with their demons. “The only real failure is the failure to try, and the measure of success is how we cope with disappointment. We get up in the morning, do our best and nothing else matters.”
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