Over the last few months, I’ve been swimming on average twice a week, sometimes on Sundays, but mainly during the week after work.
It surprises me that visiting the pool has become a routine. If you had asked whether I enjoyed swimming in 2005, my reaction would have been bitter. At the time, like most of my teenage peers, I looked forward to spending my entire summer holiday playing online video games. It was also the last thing my mother wanted.
Auntie Han, my mother’s friend who lived five minutes from us, frequented a new swimming pool, which had opened to the public a year earlier after the East Asian Games, a regional Olympics-like event, had concluded. My clever mother made a deal that I must go with Auntie Han twice a week throughout the holiday to earn the right to the computer.
Enjoying the million-dollar facility at the government-subsidized cost of $1 was a fortune I was too young to appreciate. On many dreaded mornings, I would swim half-heartedly for 20 minutes, then drift to the smaller diving pool while wishing Auntie Han would finish early, which, unfortunately, had never happened. My prime entertainment was locating the most robust return jet along the pool wall. As my calves received a free massage, I wondered why people would spend their precious summer days doing laps in a confined, rectangular box.
And here I am, 7,000 miles away and 18 years later, voluntarily expending effort for a workout I once avoided, even though a free ride is no longer available. Instead, I drive through half an hour of Bay Area traffic during rush hour to pay eight times the price for a more modest facility. Yet, this access is a privilege and a much-needed refuge.
A few years ago, my friend Louis decided to move south to Santa Barbara. He wanted to live closer to the ocean so he could fish and dive more often. “There’s nothing quite like being in the water. It’s a different world,” he said.
Jumping into the pool is entering a new world. The combination of physical exertion and rhythmic motion brings great comfort, especially in the evenings when I’ve loaded up personal and work problems from the day. Forty-five minutes feel barely enough for the chaos to settle in my jumpy mind. While the heart rate is up, my heart is paradoxically still. My favorite moment, however, is the exit. When I emerge from the water, I return to the old world with a new perspective. The knots in my muscles have loosened. The intractable issues have become out of focus and look solvable.
While doing freestyle this week, the writer John Steinbeck surprisingly came to mind. When writing his book The Grapes of Wrath, he kept a journal, which he later published as a separate book. Throughout his journal, Steinbeck documented his doubts about his project but encouraged himself to keep going and put in the day’s work.
“It will get done poco a poco,” he wrote.
Poco a poco. Little by little. That’s what lap swim is, moving forward inch by inch. Unlike my weekend basketball games, lap swimming is not a competition. It’s what the late history professor James P. Carse would call an “infinite game.” There are no agreed-upon rules on how one must swim. Anyone can enter and exit the game at any time. Each person defines what a win is. I can go slow, accelerate, or alternate the pattern. Each stroke itself is the point.
That simplicity is delightful.