I used to get up at four-forty-five in the morning to swim at a gym near my house with a three-lane indoor lap pool. This despite the fact that I hate—and I do mean loath—getting up early, and I also hate gyms. I didn’t matter. I love to swim.
It was like an early morning meditation. Thoughts drifting in and out of my head as my body moved slowly through the water (I’m a very slow swimmer). And the pool itself was lovely. The gym seemed to be from the 1980s or 90s, but the building it was in was much older and so was the pool. When you swam on your back you looked up at a ceiling exactly the color of the sky, crowned with an elaborate white plaster molding that made you feel like you were in the dining room of a Victorian mansion. It was a delight.
Then that gym closed down and I was very sad.
But I guess the fates were smiling upon me, because I heard through the grapevine about another gym, this one near my work, with an outdoor three-lane lap pool. The pool is tucked away behind the gym in the middle of a city block, surrounded on all sides by 1980s and 90s apartment buildings. You’d never in a million years know it was there unless a coworker happened to tell you. I mean, I had spent good long stretches of time googling pools in San Francisco without finding this one. But there it was. Pretty much exactly like the previous one in shape and size. But outdoors instead of indoors, so when you swim on your back you look up at the actual sky. And it’s surrounded on two sides by a wall of glass bricks.
This led me to think of the two other times in my life I’ve spent time near a wall of glass bricks. There was one in my elementary school. In the hallway that led from the first-grade classroom to the bathrooms and out onto the playground. One side of the hallway had glass bricks and the opposite wall had a mural of a dinosaur. It is clear in my mind.
Then there was my first apartment. It was a fancy loft I sublet from owners who lived in the Philippines. In theory they kept it as a San Francisco pied-a-terre, but in fact they never used it so had decided to rent it out for a year. I was lucky and got it at a bargain price. It had been one of the earliest factory-to-loft conversions in San Francisco in the 1980s or 90s. It had a beautiful exposed brick wall and an enormous window and wooden beams and, yes – the partition dividing off the sleeping loft was made of glass bricks.
But I have digressed. Which is a very accurate depiction of what my mind does when I swim. Thoughts come and go, and I watch them come and go like watching clouds. A memory. A movie. A person. A book. A philosophical question. An observation of a particular bird or tree in my line of sight. This. That. Nothing in particular. This is almost the only time that it’s like that. Most of the time I’m a person who’s always thinking, usually planning, often spinning, frequently anxious. Which is why a blithe state of meandering thought is such a pleasure.
No doubt it has something to do with the fact that I don’t push myself physically, like at all. My body is also a cloud, drifting slowly across the sky that is the top of the water. The pleasure of floating, of water on skin, of moving through a liquid medium, of feeling strong and buoyant and as if I could just go and go forever – man oh man, it’s just great.
All of which is what keeps me coming back. It isn’t easy to fit this sort of thing into a busy life, as we all know. Hence the ridiculously early mornings back in the day; and nowadays I’m lucky if I can squeeze it in one afternoon a week, late in the day, after working. Frankly, no amount of exercise-is-good-for-you virtue or guilt would be enough to get me to bother. I don’t know if even either the mind-pleasure or the body-pleasure alone would be enough.
But. You take this almost stupidly simple thing of submerging yourself in chlorinated water and pushing yourself forward through it and, if you are a certain sort of person, it makes your body and your mind feel so good. It turns both your body and your mind into clouds. How can you say no to that?
I just lay eyes on a swimming pool and I feel reverent.