There is Always Delight
Well I have learned my lesson yesterday, and I will not be entering the water from the south trail for at least another week until the sand situation recovers. I want to swim my northern route anyways today. Sure I could walk to the northern stairs but I am feeling pressed for time today and I decide to drive the two minutes it takes to get to the north end of the parking lot. It’s at least a 10 or 15 minute walk which is still about how long it used to take me to drive here.
I don’t get out the door until just after 11:00 because of all sorts of shenanigans at work. I often have to remind myself that I actually do work for a living. Just because I live at the beach now does not automatically entitle me to a life of leisure. It’s still overcast out, but I have this feeling that things are going to clear soon.
I park and then I do a pullup at the pullup bars because I was asked yesterday by a beautiful woman if I could do a pullup and I thought that I could but I was not sure so here is my opportunity to validate. Yes! I can do a pullup. I must report back to the beautiful woman with this information.
I get to the beach and there is indeed sand here on the northern half. There are no waves. It seems as soon as I walk into the water, the ground changes from sand to cobble. It’s not at all pleasant to walk on but much better than yesterday’s boulder scramble. I start swimming as soon as it is possible and I go horizontal in about 2 feet of water. Visibility is about 0%, but it is extremely comfortable. I’m off and heading north.
I’m not really sure why, but I am super hungry. Maybe because it is after 11:00 and I have not eaten anything. It’s just a guess. The water goes from brown to blue (but still bad visibility) and back to brown again before turning blue once I cross the Salt Creek border. It remains blue until I swim back to Strands.
The water is pretty bumpy which makes sense considering that it is late in the day. The small wakes seem to be blowing directly from the southwest and into my face. Still it is beautiful and alive out here. I am finding that my mind wants to be somewhere or somehow else. It’s happy where it is but wishes it were in a different state. I’ve noticed this on many swims. I get out here and I want to feel a certain way. I want to feel this sort of ecstatic and sublime spiritual feeling - whatever that feels like. My current state is a bit agitated - not terribly so - but just enough to make me feel like I must DO something to shift myself from one state to the other. I realize it just doesn’t typically work this way. I can’t force a feeling. What I have learned to be helpful is to focus on what I AM feeling. And what I mean by that, especially when I am out here in the water, is what I am physically feeling. I am physically feeling my hands and feet pounding the surface of the water. I am feeling my neck turn and my mouth rise to the surface and then I feel a breath come in. All of these physical feelings ground me to my body and to my experience of what is happening right now. It settles me. Somehow I recognize that whatever it is that I feel out here is enough and good and worth actually feeling.
How did I learn this? I learned it from coming out into the water again and again and again. I learned it by paying attention to my thoughts as I experimented with different techniques to combat the bad and icky feelings. Most of these experiments would end in failure. Yet somehow each swim would end in delight. Where did that delight come from? It came from the tactile sensations in the water that I was actually having right now. There is always delight in the water. There is always delight in the sky and the sun. There is always delight hidden, sometimes deeply, in the breath. It just requires a little extra attention to find it.
