There's A Bear On My Back, And He's Carrying A Piano

First week back in the water after winter break feels good, but I'm not so sure I look so great thrashing up and down the pool.  I'm glad I can't see myself.  Feeling out of shape is bad enough. It takes about two weeks, maybe three, to regain fitness for every week taken off, which seems to go against all the laws of physics and nature, but that's the way it is.  Take a break, pay for it later.

The pool is an old one and needs replacement.  Eight lanes, 25 yards, deep at one end.  That's it.  The poor old thing was damaged in the Loma Prieta earthquake that occurred in 1989.  Coaches and pool equipment bounced up and down for the 18 seconds or so that the earth rumbled, and patches of plaster and tiles were chipped and crunched.  They have not yet been fully repaired in all this time.  The college campus has been enjoying a gradual refurbishment over the past few years.  Unfortunately the pool is almost the last bit of the college to be replaced or upgraded.  The locker rooms are grim and cold, but we are not complaining too loudly.  We get to swim; that's the main thing.

The phrase "swim" is very subjective, I've found.  Swimmers at our pool range from floppers who barely move and somehow take up an entire lane all by themselves to fitness hounds who cross train in other sports every day, rain or shine, to swimmers heading to Junior Olympics and beyond.

There are no shortage of goals to work toward, and the amazing thing is muscles respond to stress by getting stronger no matter how old you are.  I have set a few personal goals for the first six months, and even after just one week, I feel less like a bear has jumped on my back and more like I am actually getting somewhere.  The bear is always ready to jump on, and sometimes he's carrying a piano.  If you're not a swimmer, equate that to running uphill in loose sand.  Swimmers know exactly what I mean and dread the feeling when it comes over them.  

As for competition, I don't know what will turn up on the horizon, but I'm looking around for something interesting to challenge myself with.  Hawaii?  Maybe.  California?  More likely.  But...that's the fun of it.  Swimmers comprise a big tribe and they swim in lots of different places and kinds of water.  If you know of a moderate open-water swim, drop me a line and I'll take it into consideration.  One possibility I've toyed with is an open-water series in Fiji that I read about online.  Who knows....

You Hold A Baby

The baby is sleeping, a little soft sandbag of warmth that smells tender and sweet, like milk warming.  It is lost to the world, adrift in dreams, limp and warm.  Its cheeks are flushed pink and the hair damp.  It is exquisitely soft.

You hold this baby against your shoulder, its head lying like a weight, lips pursed and eyelashes like tiny strokes of a fine pen dark against the skin.  You are thinking about dinner, errands, your need to go to the bathroom soon, and you are thinking about the baby being very warm against you.  You are holding still, unwilling to move in case it might wake and fuss.  But the baby is motionless save its regular breathing.  Its arms are lying one flopped here under your chin and one there over your arm, both shorter in length than the distance from your wrist to your elbow.

The baby is dreaming now, its eyelids moving, its fingers curling and then unfurling.  It sighs deeply and goes back to quiet respiration, breathing perfectly.  How tender its skin is and how vulnerable it is to everything.  It is just like a doll.  How can a baby dream who has never done anything or been anywhere?  What memory can it have?

Your mind shifts from chores to thoughts of other children, small and large, who were once this small not long ago.  You remember yourself small, how you could see your parents up above you if you looked up with your head tilted back, parents eyes far above you, looking down as if from a distant place.

You forget about chores and time going by and feel the several pounds of tiny human being, a pleasing not-heaviness which is substantially light, alive there right next to your heart.  The baby is soft yet firm, robust but delicate, glowing with life.

Who will this child become?  Whose shoulder did you sleep upon?  You love this peace and stillness, know it will not last but feel a quiet ease in all the rush and worry of the day.  The baby seems to have sprawled against you to hold you down, make you realize that moments like this, moments of stillness, refresh your spirit and center your soul.  You close your eyes and breathe in time with this little one who knows nothing, its life just beginning.  You are in love you realize, just because this baby has fallen deep asleep on you, pinning you - you feeling helpless and amazed - both your hearts beating side by side.

One in Seven Billion, Totally Unique

What is your purpose in life and how do you know if you've found it?  Getting back to the clues the universe leaves around, the fingerprints of your talent and gifts, I believe you know early on what fascinates you, pulls you into its realm of possibility.  Math?  Dance?  Texture?  Words?  Patterns?  Ideas?  No one knows the things you know in exactly the way you know them or will ever live the sequence of events you have lived through.  Horrors and joys, love and anger in the places you have known them make you able to do what only you can do, create only as you can.

There are things that you discount because they are simple to you.  You have not pushed the boundaries of what you can do with your talent if the thing is easy to you or boring.  If the thing that you love to do is difficult but fascinating, do it; something about that fascination is a clue to you about your essential qualities, the you that is nobody else.  Maybe there is something you feel is crucially important to work on and cannot let go of.  That's what's working you; your gifts are being brought to bear.

The most frustrating tragedies in life are often due to a denial of true self.  The great loss of talent and potential through oppression and too-early death is an immeasurable tragedy.  But poor self-esteem, lack of awareness of possibility and a sense of false obligation to standards imposed by others are potentially as ruinous to us as death is.  Often in society we feel obliged to do what others tell us to do, believing they understand our destinies and our hearts better than we understand our own.  But that's impossible.  Nobody knows you like you, and no one sees the situation just like you do.  Witnesses to crimes and catastrophes all have tell a different version of what happened - they all literally saw something different than the other witnesses did.

In a way, the uniqueness of our personal existence leads to loneliness and a sense of separateness.  We may say, "No one sees it like I do; no one understands me," and it's the truth.  In my opinion, I want to see it like no one else does.  I don't want to be the same as anyone else.  I was born me, and that is who I must be.  However, if I forge ahead without considering the giving of my gifts to the world, my talents will become burdens, to me and to my community.

I don't believe that talent or purpose is so easy to recognize that we can just sit under a shade tree until the apple of opportunity falls into our laps.  Joseph Campbell said he wished the term he coined "follow your bliss" had been expressed as "follow your blisters."  It's a trudge, a lifelong journey undertaken to express our talent and find purpose in life.  Who doesn't ask, "Why am I here?"  I have, many times. Seems to me my purpose is to find my purpose, and I'm still trying to figure it out.

Automatic Glory

I was looking into a new computer yesterday.  The one I like has a terabyte of something on it.  It sounds prehistorically glorious.  Maybe it grows legs and screams and runs around the room with large menacing claws. Not likely, but with terminology invented by teenaged boys, capabilities are more likely to trend in that direction than toward cute hairdos and bling.  

Computers are everywhere now.  TVs are computers, DVD players with recording devices are computers, and cars have computers in them.  They start the car, assess the engine, check the brakes and dim the lights.  They tell us how to get to the nearest pizza joint and when to turn and proceed straight ahead while driving in unfamiliar towns.

Nothing is done unless a computer gets its motherboard into the mix somehow.  People go to YouTube to get instructions on how to knit, when in the past they just sat with their grandmothers and learned how.  Now grandmothers are somewhere else getting their hair color balanced (analyzed by computers) and nails polished (colors designed on a computer) or vacationing on cruise ships run by computers.

Airport trams are managed by computer systems.  At Denver International way out on the plains near Kansas, you fly in on a computer-piloted jet (the pilot keeps the seat warm in the cockpit), the bags are loaded onto a computerized baggage system and you find your way to the claim area to pick them up from a computerized baggage merry-go-round after being whisked to the area on a driver-less train.  People step on en masse, grip handrails after being commanded to do so by a computer voice, and the doors swoosh closed.  Then you rumble at a speed determined by a computer through an underground route to your destination, announced by the computer voice.  The doors fly open and everyone is commanded to exit to the platform or risk getting crushed in the computer-controlled door.  Everyone obeys.

The computer-driven world has no patience for laggards.  If you cannot figure out what you are to do next, you are hung up on, left behind, silenced or deleted.  That's it, you're done slow poke.

So, this new computer with terabytes of something is arrayed with features I am to adore and use to bring ease and comfort to my life, freeing up gigabytes of time with which I may whisk through my days effortlessly.  I dunno.  I was kind of hoping instead I'd find a good fireplace and a few good friends to sit around with and shoot the breeze, but they're all busy fixing their computers.

A To-Do Day And Then Tah Dah!

It was a jiggedy day today whose middle was filled with errands and to-dos but it ended in a grand "tah dah!"  It was made of many stepping-stone parts that formed a satisfying whole.  Mondays are often like that; they seem to flop into big chairs and slump with a feeling of "whew, now that was something," like Sunday took all the good things and left junk behind.

First, I swam with friends, back in the pool again finally after a two-week holiday break. Fitness has slipped and I need lots of hours of work to get back in shape.  I had lunch at The Breakfast Club in Seaside where a waitress who was petite, wiry and looked like a roller derby player brought me an enormous plate of salad and a bowl of soup.  It was almost as big as she was.  I saw her staggering along with it and the other plates of food she brought to us.  She needed a U-Haul truck for goodness sake.

Gabriel the New, grand-nephew of minute proportions, age five months, gazed upon his world philosophically until he was handed a big shiny teaspoon.  While I and two loved ones ate our massive lunches, his eyes fixed upon a teaspoon and both hands grasped it with the strength of ten monkeys.  Into his mouth it went, sure as sunrise, for evaluation.  He gummed everything he could find while we talked and caught up on news.  After some good-luck kisses on his soft cheeks, he and his mom said good-bye, to meet again in a week or two.  He is handsome already, and it is assured that girls will find him irresistible, but he will not know they exist, I'll bet.  We shall see.  He has to get out of diapers first.

Friends and errands took up bits and chunks of time until I realized sunset was nearly upon me.  There are many dramatic vistas on our local shores, and today's very low tide produced unusual features of rock, exposed seaweed and stampeding breakers backlit by the setting sun.  Every day, cars and bicycles migrate to the western shore, assembling along Sunset Drive and at Asilomar State Beach.  Clumps of people stand along the walking path or sit in their parked cars to witness the inexorable slow descent of the sun to the horizon and its tatters of gold shredded across the sky.  I don't know how they feel exactly, but in my mind there is music and the Almighty is present in a grand and commanding display.