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Gray Matter
Swim
Simply put, “Swimming is my bliss.”
“The water doesn’t know how old I am,” I begin, explaining how on good days I swim (and/or exercise in the water) for an hour. If my listener is still tolerant I launch into an elegy, citing benefits of regular water exercise:
1) Yes, it relieves stress; 2) Plus, there is a low risk of injury; consider, you weigh only one tenth of your normal weight in the forgiving water.
3) Swimming is a preferred workout for those nursing injury, infirmity, or perhaps are overweight.
“The longer I live the more I respect swimming,” writes Mary Pipher in “Letters to a Young Therapist” (Basic Books; 2003). “Swimming relaxes, massages, and awakens punished bodies.”
In an essay, author Pipher, a Nebraska native, recounts how on trips to her YWCA she watches “Elderly people walk gingerly into the pool area, wincing as they go down the ladders…But after an hour of water aerobics they are talking and joking. Their pain abates…”
From a third floor perch above the pool in Lake Worth, FL, a family retreat, I watch a woman pushing a walker. At poolside, finally, she slowly lowers herself into the water. Plainly, she is aged, overweight and merely a “stirrer”—someone who seldom breaks the water’s surface as she moves about.
Nonetheless, the warrior persists for 30 minutes in her regimen, this last great battle against old age and, possibly, an accompanying invalidism.
The late author, essayist and inveterate swimmer Eda LeShan was a victim of stroke when she publicly declared, “I am, at 70, one “helluva’ good swimmer.” Pardon me, please, but I echo the LeShan boast, and then add another nine years to her total.
“Hidden somewhere in the pursuit of regular exercise,” Michigan State professor Wilfred Graham once said, “is the notion that if one keeps moving, one will never be caught in the wires and tubes” that some members of the oldest-old tribe suffer today, oftentimes against their own will.
Perhaps that is part of this equation, but I prefer to report that we come from water and, largely, are water. Natalie Angier writes in The New York Times, “As fetuses, we gestate in bags of water. As adults, we are bags of water: roughly 60 percent of our body weight…”
So, when I lower my body into the pool (or ocean) and push off, taking those first strokes and picking up some forward movement, peace becomes mine. “Time in the water is a time of renewal and rejuvenation,” swimmer Leonard E. Goodman tells a newsman, while the late author and Aquarian, John Jerome, wrote: “The moment the water encloses me, I am, gratefully, alone…Swimming is between me and the water, nothing else.”
Lastly, I am the beneficiary of an added bonus from my water-time because grandchildren oftentimes surround me. Some grandmothers bake for their beloveds; other grandparents spoil their youngsters with trips to faraway places. Me; I am down in the water, right up close to these rascals. In this way, I find opportunities to ‘steal’ free hugs.
And, best of all, we seven now reconnect and bond. Moreover, when the eldest, teenager and University of Florida junior Melissa Adele Lindeman, yells: “Let’s all swim out to the ropes,” everyone must exercise, another byproduct to our shared joy in the Atlantic Ocean.
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Outrageous Associations
