The Art of Floating

My first experience with water was being dropped directly in it from five feet above. I wasn’t yet two years old and was still perfecting the act of walking. My Mother, and defacto swim instructor, said that I would either swim or I would drown, but she would pull me up before the latter was even possible.

I swam.

Like the animal instinct we all inherit, a force within my body figured out how to move before my brain could catch up. I was a natural in the water, kicking and paddling, and pushing my way through the water with ease. But alas, as any young child finally does, I tired and the ease in that once came fell away as the water felt heavier to push through. As my ability to keep my head above water dissipated and the only taste in my mouth became chlorine and panic, my mother taught me perhaps the most important life lesson: The Art of Floating.

She quickly grabbed me and told me to breathe and relax every muscle in my body, like I was going to sleep. She held my head as she pushed my body up toward the surface. As my breath slowed to the rhythm by which she swayed by body through the water, I felt a sense of calm wade through me. The water pushing into my ears soundproofed me to the world. Everything else was a mere muffle to the stillness that incensed my body. After what felt like hours of wadding, she pulled me into her chest and told me that if I ever felt as though I just couldn’t swim any longer, as though I didn’t have the strength for one more stroke, my only hope would be to float. She also used a metaphor about surviving some sort of ship wreck and needing to be prepared to survive the perilous journey back to shore (it’s still a toss up as to who I inherited my wild imagination from.)

Now, as I am wadding through the peril that has been the year 2020 I am thinking back to this lesson first absorbed in the community swimming pool: The Art of Floating. I began my 2020 by taking a 6 week long trip to Asia and Australia after graduating college a month prior. It was 6 weeks of self-discovery and growth. Of cultivating passions and self-indulgent whims. I returned home to the job that has supported me through college, a place of familiarity and comfort. Only a few weeks passed before Corona haunted the world I knew at home. I was fired from the only true job I have known, forcing me to seek employment from a local grocery store. While the job was fine, It certainly wasn’t a chapter straight from my dream journal. I spent time playing comparisons to my peers who where beginning their first real jobs in different cities across the world. I was twenty-three with a college degree, sanitizing shopping charts, and living in my childhood bedroom.

Now, as we approach Thanksgiving - my favorite of holidays, I am at odds with myself. I derive most of my self-worth, as I expect many do, from what I am achieving. In high school, I strove to have perfect grades and lead every committee and club I could. In college I was acing course work, performing, traveling, and forming bonds with people who inspired me. All of which leading up to the goal of becoming an actor (cue the looks of pity, the sighs of disappoint, the “it’s never going to work out”, and the “it's not too late.” words of “encouragement”.) As unlikely and lofty a goal as becoming a working actor, it is even more far-fetched in the midst of living through a global pandemic in Ohio. While I have since regained my old job that mostly fulfills me and I have found a semblance of routine amidst the chaos, I still feel an emptiness in my spirit.

I have been trained, or conditioned if you will, to constantly feel as though I must be progressing, or achieving in order to feel of value in my own life. As I field questions about my future plans I grow more and more despondent as I find fewer and fewer answers to offer. How could I give certain answers to anything when I can’t even predict if I will be permitted to go into my job next week, or if my state will be in lockdown once again? How can I give a definitive moving date in a state in which so many people are still dying of a virus? For the past few months of sleepless nights, raging anxiety and a fallacious smile permanently transfixed to my face, smothered by my mask, I have felt the same feeling of being in that pool, mouth filling with chemically treated water, losing any semblance of control, and grasping in panic for something steady to hold on to.

While out a walk the other day, as leaves crunched under my feet, my arms tensed from the cold, and my head struggling to cling to a singular thought, I heard my mothers voice, “When you can’t swim any longer, just float.”

Well, that was the issue all along. In a world transfixed on achievement and the importance of progressing forward as our only aim, I mistook floating for drowning. In the cocktail of climate crisis, global pandemic, horrifying political chaos, understandable civil unrest, and familial turmoil, I thought that if I stopped to catch my breath, I would drown.

Humans are not fish, we are not meant to be continuously swimming. We need periods of time to relieve ourselves of the pressure to progress and simply catch our breath. We can not keep moving exhausted, confused, and hopelessly clinging to the idea of a shore that could be miles further away. Our only hope in this damn world is to take the time when we need it to rest before we can have any hope to begin again.

I have since began looking for ways to make 2020, and the near future as my time of rest. A time in which I am affording myself the necessary rest to catch my breath. To read books I love and movies I have seen too much of. To memorize monologues I love and perform them for no one outside of my bedroom. To not force myself into daily runs when sometimes all my body wants is a gentle stroll. I am taking what I, and so many others often starve ourselves of, the patience to relieve ourselves of the ache to be progressing, and just float. There will be a time in the future when the tide has turned and it is once again easy to see the shore line in the distance, but that time is not now. So as my mother taught me so many years ago, I will be allowing my body to rest on the surface, the sounds of the worlds a mere muffle in my ear, and just float.