Swimming and the Meaning of Life

One of my earliest and most vivid childhood memories is of swimming in a cool pool bounded by boulders in the middle of a river in the mountains of Bulgaria, the late-afternoon sun casting komorebi on the water through the rustling leaves. I can still hear the feeling-tone in my body, the strange and lovely simultaneity of absolute presence and absolute peace. I didn’t yet know the word for transcendence. Not long after that, I began swimming competitively in a chlorinated Olympic pool, investing long hours in perfecting my stroke and bettering my lap times. Those four years became a hard initiation into a culture that prizes productivity above presence. At eleven, I was beginning to see how the moment we incline action toward achievement, we drain the activity of joy; how anything we approach transactionally will never yield transcendence. I stopped swimming abruptly, disaffected and worn out. It would take me a quarter century to return to the water — it was only when I was drowning in the 800-page manuscript of my first book that I began swimming daily in the open ocean to think through the edits, to feel myself in the womb of the world while trying to birth something bigger than myself. This spiritual dimension of swimming in wild nature comes vividly alive in Roger Deakin’s delicious book Waterlog: A Swimmer’s Journey Through Britain (public library). Illustration by Margaret C. Cook for a rare 1913 edition of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. (Available as a print.) “Such indelible swims are like dreams, and have the same profound effect on the mind and spirit,” he writes of the transcendences he discovered when, suffused with sadness at the end of a long love, he began swimming in rivers, scribbling in his notebook: All water, river, sea, pond, lake, holds memory and the space to think. Our profound response to water appears to be our evolutionary inheritance — we came out of the ocean, of course, but never fully. Drawing on marine biologist Sir Alister Hardy’s aquatic theory of human evolution, later deepened by evolutionary historian Elaine Morgan in her classic The Descent of Woman, Deakin writes: We spent ten million years of the Pliocene era of world drought evolving into uprightness as semi-aquatic waders and swimmers in the sea shallows and on the beaches of Africa. We went through a sea change to become what we are, and our subsequent life on dry land is a relatively recent, short-lived affair. Apart from the proboscis monkey of Borneo, we are the only primate that regularly takes to the water for the sheer joy of it. We are also singularly hairless like dolphins and, alone amongst the primates, have a layer of subcutaneous fat analagous to the whale’s blubber, ideal for keeping warm in the water. Hardy had arrived as his theory by way of a single, startling insight — that the vestigial hairs on our bodies are arranged in a pattern completely unique among apes; that when a human swims through a water tunnel, the hydrodynamic lines representing the trajectory of water flow map exactly onto the lines drawn by the pattern of body hairs. In consonance with Rachel Carson’s recognition that because “our origins are of the earth… there is in us a deeply seated response to the natural universe, which is part of our humanity,” Swimming appears to be our most direct way of contacting our creaturely belonging with the world. Deakin writes: When you swim, you feel your body for what it mostly is — water — and it begins to move with the water around it… The swimmer experiences the terror and the bliss of being born. So swimming is a rite of passage, a crossing of boundaries: the line of the shore, the bank of the river, the edge of the pool, the surface itself. When you enter the water, something like metamorphosis happens. Leaving behind the land, you go through the looking-glass surface and enter a new world, in which survival, not ambition or desire, is the dominant aim… You are in nature, part and parcel of it, in a far more complete and intense way than on dry land, and your sense of the present is overwhelming. Art by Monika Vaicenavičienė from What Is a River? That bewildering sense of aliveness comes aglow in the book’s final pages as Deakin reflects on how absurd the lengths he goes to for a transcendent swim may seem from the outside, yet how to him it is “always an entirely serious enterprise, if at times surrealist,” and one that always leaves him “enriched.” I turned off down a timeless sandy avenue of oaks, potholed by rabbits, to a distant farmhouse on a promontory jutting into the wide Blyth marshes… I cycled by the woods where George Orwell made love to Eleanor Jaques, his neighbour when he lived at Southwold, and into the village past the ruined church where he used to sit and read. I passed the house of Freddy the fisherman (“The Sole Plaice for Some Fin Special”). It was a quarter past six, and the sun, which already shared the sky with the blushing new moon, was beginning to go down. I hurried out over the little wooden bridge where they hold the annual crabbing contest in summer, and printed faint tyre-tracks across the last two hundred yards of cracked saltpan desert mud on Walberswick marsh. Scaling the sand-dunes, I ran down the deserted beach, flung off my clothes and waded into the surf. I felt the sweetness of tired limbs and fell headlong into the waves, striking towards the horizon that appeared intermittently beyond the breakers. I had left my rucksack and clothes beside a beautiful pebble starfish on the beach, another echo of the Scilly Maze. Perhaps I had at last swum my way through it. When I reached the relative calm of unbroken swell, I looked back towards the shore. A crimson mist lay over the sea as a red-hot sun dropped over the pantiled roofs behind the sand-dunes. The sea-fret shaded to a deep purple along the curve of the bay where Dunwich should have been, and obscured the giant puffball of Sizewell B. One of the beauties of this flat land of Suffolk is that when you’re swimming off the shore and the waves come up, it subsides from view and you could be miles out in the North Sea. An orange sickle of new moon hung above the chimneys in a deep mauve sky. Autumn bonfires glowed in the mist and floated white smoke-rings above it. The beach shone in the gathering dusk as the tide fell and the sea grew less perturbed. I turned and swam on into the quiet waves. Such homilies on presence are also an act of resistance, of reclamation, of revolutionary rapture against the tyrannies of our present: Most of us live in a world where more and more places and things are signposted, labelled, and officially “interpreted.” There is something about all this that is turning the reality of things into virtual reality. It is the reason why walking, cycling and swimming will always be subversive activities. They allow us to regain a sense of what is old and wild… by getting off the beaten track and breaking free of the official version of things… [to access] that part of our world which, like darkness, mist, woods or high mountains, still retains most mystery. Complement Waterlog with Bill Hayes on swimming as the poetry of the body and artist Lisa Congdon’s illustrated celebration of the joy of swimming, then revisit Robert Macfarlane’s superb reckoning with the aliveness of rivers. donating = lovingFor seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. 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