Swimming: Control vs Trust

The complex I live in has a pool and so I took a swim today, and boy did I have a rush of thought and a rush of emotion, let me explain. Until today I have never gone for a swim alone in this pool, Ive only swam when Ive had company. Why? Because something in me didn’t want to swim alone and moreover to be seen swimming alone. Quite a contradiction for me as Ive always held aloneness as sacrosanct in my life. I moved here to be alone and have held up aloneness as a medal of honour in some respects, even though all I know about human beings tells me tht we aren’t meant to be alone but we are meant to be in relation to others. Ive prided myself on being alone and being alone by choice. So as I took the plunge, so to speak, my issues of being alone surfaced.

Maybe another reason I don’t swin often is based on my fear of drowning. When I was younger and learning to swim, I very nearly drown, ad since then Ive been unable to swim in deep water. Whenever I feel Im swimming in an area where if I wanted to I could find solid ground beneath me, I panic and loose my ability to swim. I break the first rule of swimming: trust the water and feel completely out of control. So what I do is I panic and loose control of even the things I can control.

Today, in that pool aloneness met control and they had a good ole chat. See, it dawned on me that the reason why I am and have been alone is because it provided me with a sense of control. In relation to others and in companionships, you cannot control, you must rely on trust. You have to trust that the person or people you let into your life will stay and not intentionally hurt you, which is very difficult. So, I figured that being alone I was in control, but my inability to swim alone until today made me question that sense of control. Could it be that even being alone required trust? I didn’t swim alone before because it would be a judgment against me confirming my alone status, but I wasn’t okay with that…I couldn’t trust myself to be at peace in that situation. I had to ask myself if I trusted that I can be alone and could be just fine. I had to learn today, that I can survive and be okay by myself, but it needed to be because I trusted myself and God, and not because I was trying to maintain control.

What a complex swim this had become…

The motto of the story would be: swimming is an analytic sport.