Just Noise

June gloom again. No sun and also no surprises. I tell you, go a few days without the sun and it feels like it will never come back. I remind myself that I used to hate the sun (it’s true) and loved these cloudy mornings and got all miffed when the sun eventually would come out. I respond to myself that I don’t care what I used to think. I want my sun back. I then need to intervene between my two selves in order to stop a fight and try to keep both parties in their right mind - whichever one that is.

I’ve swam the last four days in a row and this will be the fifth. That’s a pretty good run for me. I just can’t think of a compelling reason not to swim. Conditions are good and although I am busy, I think I can swing this. So off to the beach I go a little before 10:00. There is some texture on the water and the water looks super dark but also inviting. As far as temperature goes, I feel like I’m flying blind. When I checked the buoys this morning, they were all offline. Super odd. I have no idea what is going on in the water. Is this a sign of a coming apocalypse? Are the buoys the first thing to go? The vast majority of society has no idea. Who looks at those things. I do. Should I warn someone? Ok, it’s time to intervene again and get myself on the right track.

I manage to get all my selfs into the water and start swimming. At first the water seems cold. It always seems cold at first. Then it seems fine and then it just feels kind of cold. Not in a hypothermic kind of a way. It’s just cold. Like that feeling you have when you wish you had one more layer. I guess this is when all the wetsuit wearing swimmers tell me their is a solution to this. Go ahead, but I’m not changing.

Despite being chilly, the swim was great. I swam north and it was predictably beautiful. It is never NOT beautiful. The water was terrible but wonderful. All of my selves could not shut up over the entire swim but I had the sound of the splish splash of the water to accompany their din. I felt like my mind was trying to expand in all directions and every neuron had a different idea as to just which direction it preferred. How do we live like this? I remember in my early 20’s I realized that I had this constant narration in my head (mind you, not a audible voice telling me to harm myself or others) and I thought I was different and flawed because of it. It would be many years before I discovered meditation and the fact that we all struggle with this inner chorus.

Today I have found lots of ways and tools to soften the inner dissonance, but it is and always will be there. The ocean is one such tool. The ocean can bring my voices into focus, but on a day like today there is just no quelling the noise. However what the ocean can still do is show me that it is just noise. That’s all.