Swimming

Swimming is one of the things I love to do alongside yoga, and I plan to make August all about swimming (I'm a fair weather swimmer!).  I think the two go together beautifully...this article (yogaforswimmers) agrees...although I have to admit I am a lazy swimmer. After a few lengths I like to float with my swim board back and forth, ideally next to clean swimmers, efficient and smooth, and away from splashers, the ones at war with the water.

I've been swimming since i was a tiny, one of the only things my parents were adamant me and my brothers stuck with,  but it took me a long time to get the point of laps. How boring to go back and forth and back and forth!? No splashes and jumps, no breath-holding contests, handstands and underwater races. In the end, there was no escaping it. I love the water so to stay in the pool, I had to adapt.  So now I swim laps, but I pretend I'm something else. Are the other people just counting laps and watching the clock? Or, like me, are they playing a game? Half the fun of swimming is pretending. In the water, I'm never just myself - I am a long-distance champion, a mermaid or whale or castaway or otter or crocodile, observing and thinking.

So I wonder about the other swimmers. They look sober and orderly (mostly), but maybe inside they are sharks and dolphins. Or maybe not, and I'm the only crocodile.

image found here