Wide Swimming
The space we take up in the world
The gym had limited hours this Memorial Day, so the pool was pretty full when I got there. One lane was full of older women bouncing in the water and talking together in a language I didn’t understand. The other had two swimmers doing lazy laps and the middle lane had one swimmer. I slid into the middle lane and waited a bit, the polite pause, hey, I’m in your lane, we can nod at each other so you can see and acknowledge that I’m here … or not.
The other guy in the lane was in good shape, about my age, making a big point of swimming without stopping, kick turn after kick turn. But he wasn’t so great at navigation. While the space circumscribed by the lane markers was plenty big for the both of us, he kept drifting over to my side. Into my lane. At one point I stopped, stood up, and tried to say something to him but he swam on.
Wide swimmers. The plague of my pool experience. Since I swim for a while, I had time to think about it. I was more uncomfortable because it was a man, the deeply conditioned gendered experience of being a woman in proximity to physical threat from a man. While almost every wide swimmer ever in the history of wide swimmers has been an older white guy, there have been one or two women. Even though no wide swimmer presents more of a threat than a few bruises, the men scare me more. I’ve spent so much of my life being hyper aware of where a man is in space to protect myself from him getting into my space in a way that leaves a mark.
Since he refused to lift his head from the water, even when I stood up next to him mid-lane, I couldn’t ask him to move over. Dialog wasn’t an option. As he swam next to me towards his kick turn his foot caught my thigh and calf. Since I was pissed, I swam fast, faster than he was, which I understood with that same instinct would just piss him off more.
Finally, as he barreled down my lane towards me, on a collision course, I realized that as my arm lifted in the arc of the crawl stroke it would strike his arm in the arc of his crawl stroke. I put my whole body into it and our arms met at the top of the stroke, but I was ready for it and the impact was satisfying. I’ll have a bruise on my hand, but he stuck to his side of the lane after that.
Once I got over my acute umbrage at this man and the men like him, once I had another satisfying and entirely uncharitable grousing session with another woman lap swimmer, the age-old consolation of women troubled by men, I thought of something else. This isn’t, for me, about men and women.
Instead, I thought about all the ways in which we disregard the impact we have on the environment around us. The literal environment, all of the disposable coffee cups and wipes and cheap clothing and whatever other crap we buy that’s going to fill up another landfill somewhere. The impacts of our decisions as a culture and as a nation on the world around us, the impact on our children’s children’s children. The impact of our politics on actual children who are starving or being killed, who don’t have access to healthcare, food or safe housing. That’s harder to think about.
Umbrage drives engagement. Self-righteousness is heady, that conviction that we are right, that we have the whole story, the one right solution. When two people who are puffed up with their own rightness, stuffed full of their conviction collide, its good theater, but it doesn’t heal or help or move anyone forward. It can inspire a brute, reflective reaction, but often will just lead to more conflict.
As I swam, I thought about the last guy that ran into me in the pool. He literally swam straight into me, my head hit his head, and I pulled up out of the water pissed off. I saw that he was in his eighties, at least, and that he had a caregiver who sat in a chair at the end of lane and looked up at the disturbance. He seemed confused and I felt bad for him, glad I had choked down the cuss words that rose in my mouth after he ran into me. I went into another lane. What if this guy, today’s wide swimmer, had some visual challenges, what if he was deaf? Then my elaborately constructed narrative edifice crumbles down, and with it my sense of being aggrieved.
I write 800-1000 words a week, quickly and frequently for this substack, in addition to my other writing. I’m often scanning my experience for peak aggrievement, registering the umbrage factor, wanting to drive that ever-elusive engagement. But as an actual human being, I want to move in the other direction. It’s difficult and almost counter-cultural. In what ways do I do the very thing that is irritating me? In what ways do I move through the world causing waves that disturb others? Where am I unaware of the impact of my words or actions? Where am I racing, trying to win, being territorial when it’s not needed, just habit? Who made me Queen of the Pool, arbiter of all things swim lane involved?
I’m going to be spending time in a few weeks with beloved family members who believe very different things than I do about politics, the role of government and who should lead this country. I don’t want to barrel ahead in collision course with anyone. I don’t want to fight or best or argue with people whose life experience and beliefs are different than mine. I don’t need to be swim punching anyone, metaphorically or literally. Instead, I’m going to try to be like the older women by the steps into the pool, bouncing together, laughing and talking, trying to understand another language that makes perfect sense to the people who grew up speaking it and just float for a while.