Pools are for Swimming

A thought exercise for our times

What happens when life feels like drowning?

Anxiety and stress are byproducts of the body’s fight or flight response — the state of indecision between the two is experienced as panic. You might be surprised at how small a stimulus it takes for it to be triggered!

Naturally, it can happen from having a gun aimed at you.

Alternatively, it can happen from a single thought.

It happens to a gazelle made aware of a looming lion, just as it would happen to you if cornered by a grizzly bear. There is a clear evolutionary purpose to the flight or flight response, and it has and continues to serve us well in extreme circumstances. But what happens when the same parts of our brain, that function in order tell us when our existence is literally being threatened, are running all the time (albeit at different intensities)? Certainly nothing helpful.

Chronic stress and anxiety are not good for the body. Biology backs this up, as does the swath of empirical evidence that has led to us Millennials being correctly labeled by the APA (and almost anyone you might ask) as the “most stressed generation”. And while generationally they remain, on average, more stressed than their older counterparts, the same report points out that around a third of all participants reported increased stress levels in the last year regardless of their age.

So many of us are experiencing fight or flight or one of its byproducts all the time. I’m one of them. And the fact that it’s been normalized makes matters worse.

We can point to, discuss, and tackle the tangible stressors in our lives, and we can (although often don’t) do so to great effect. As someone with a chronic illness — one for which the medical bills, without insurance, can cost $300K+ a year — yeah, I can point to that as a pretty big f*cking stressor. And I’m confident that you can point to things in your life that are stressors too (try writing them down as a list if you haven’t).

But I have a hunch — a profound one that I cannot ignore — that even if all of the external stressors on my list (or yours) were magically taken away, I would soon realize that it was not as much of a solution as I initially thought. It is out of this hunch that I was able to write this piece, and it is through consideration of whatever value lies in it that our thought experiment begins.

Pools are for swimming.

Imagine you are thrown into a pool without knowledge of how to swim. You experience fight or flight as a response. You’re scared you might drown, and this is certainly a possibility. But, allowing the fight or flight response to take hold will lower your chances of survival.

You can’t panic and flail. You must relax. You must relax within and surrounded by this thing (the pool, the water) that can kill you. How?

You have to respect this reality, accept it as impossible to fight, and only then will you be afforded the mental clarity (the lack of anxiety/ fear) to relax, and swim.

Through this, we can realize that being born into life is just like being thrown into the pool. In the same vein, learning to swim is just like learning how to live.

• If you don’t want to drown you must swim or get out of the pool. In life, if you don’t want to die you must … hm, now we’re stuck.

We’re stuck because, if you don’t want to die, you can’t do anything about it. It’s going to happen.

But drowning is not like death in this analogy, as in the “pool” that is life, death is inevitable.

So let’s look at death, and break it into two types:

“Physical Death” on one hand, and “Death of the Self” (of your Spirit, Soul, Atman, whatever you wanna call it — it really doesn’t matter), on the other. And, this death of the Self is effectively indistinguishable from existing in a type of living death (this living death can be understood via analouge in what we refer to as “going through the motions,” if taken to its extreme). All you have to know is that your life is one that is experienced by the Self. Your life and the thing that experiences it, i.e. you, are not the same.

So I suggest that while physical death is out of our control, death of the Self is not.

So let’s plug “death of the Self” into our analogy as the counterpart to drowning, since, like drowning, whether or not it happens is in our control:

• If you don’t want to drown you must swim or get out of the pool. In life, if you don’t want to experience this death of the Self, you must live or …hm, stuck again.

We’re stuck because, if life is analogous to the pool, the problem is that there is no “getting out of the pool” that is life.

Here we have no workaround.

• If you don’t want to drown, you must swim or get out of the pool. If you don’t want to experience this death of the Self, you must live. There is no “or.”

Let’s alter our analogy for a slightly different but extremely relevant point.

Let’s make our pool more similar to real life. And we’ll do this by pretending we’re in the Sims, a simulation video game.

In the Sims, you can prompt your “Sim” (a simulated person) to get into a pool. And because in the world of the Sims you are omnipotent, you could, if you so choose, remove the ladder to get out of the pool and: Voila! You have now made death by drowning inescapable for your Sim. The Sim will either drown or become fatigued to the point of drowning. Just in the same way that in life, death is inescapable. What fun! (:

So, what are the ramifications of this new pool situation?

• Well, if you’re in a pool with no way out your options are to drown now, or to swim for as long and hard as you can and drown later.

And if that sounds bleak to you, well — I’m sorry to say that this is the exact situation we’re in. But it’s not as bleak as you might think.

Now lets go back to the first, non-Sims pool, and take it a step further.

What would be your impression of someone who was in the pool, with no ladder, who insisted that they were in no danger of drowning? What if they said, defiantly, that they weren’t in a pool when you could obviously see they were? You would at minimum be concerned at how disconnected from reality and in denial they were.

This is exactly the situation that we find ourselves in. In life, we are in a pool of water with no escape, but instead of acknowledging this and spending our time swimming (living), we often spend it in denial that swimming (living) is our only option. We might even create systems that reassure us that this is not our only option by way of promising something after the pool (life). This might be the case, sure, but respectfully 1) no one definitely knows and 2) even if you did know of this definitively, taking solace in this promise being better than your current situation in the pool (life), puts you in a position where you feel inclined to wait for it. And suddenly you are spending your limited time in the pool (in life) doing nothing but waiting. And if you think that the idea of spending your life waiting for something that hasn’t happened yet (and isn’t guaranteed to happen) is depressing, it’s because it is.

If you are one of the many who believe in something greater than or after life, good! Just don’t spend your time waiting to see it.

And listen. If you’re expecting a promotion, or your retirement; a new car, or that special someone; a long term goal accomplished, or, someday, that moment where you know you’ve finally made it, good. I mean that — we have to strive for something. And we all must decide for ourselves what’s worth striving for. But the verb is strive. None of it is guaranteed. Don’t spend your time waiting to see it.

And if this seems even more depressing, it’s because it is. And it’s because at this point in our analogy, we can begin to understand that the pool of life is actually much more like an ocean than a pool. Because a pool is nice, and so too do we imagine life within the pool. But oceans storm, their waves ebb and flow. Their relationship with the sky and even the moon can, in a moment, give way to tempests so powerful that they make sailors believe in God, and in another exist in such a perfect calm that can very well have the same effect. Is life not the same thing?

Cuba, 2017 — whether I saw a sunset or a hurricane was not up to me

It gets even more interesting here, because in response to finding ourselves in an ocean, many of choose to focus our energies towards building walls around ourselves in an effort to create a pool. And we make this choice because a pool is nice — certainly it’s more comfortable than an ocean. But regardless of whether your life is spent building this pool, or at one point within it yours is complete, this pool can never be like a pool one might expect to find in a backyard. Your pool is still in the ocean, you’re still in the pool, and much of your life’s work has been in an effort to ignore these truths. What happens when the next storm breaks the “pool” you’ve built?

So lets make it less depressing.

1. If all you can do is swim while you’re stuck in the open waters of the ocean, why would you not do it?
2. If all you can do is live while you’re stuck in life, why would you not do it?
3. And why, in either of those cases, would you spend more of your time building walls than learning how to swim in whatever ocean you’re in?

And it’s worth noting that there are many ways to swim in water just as there are many (innumerable) ways to live in life.

It’s actually not limiting or depressing at all. Quite the opposite. Hell, maybe while you’re in the pool you discover a new stroke that no one’s used before…

Anything else, and you’re building walls while waiting to drown, probably in denial that it’s gonna happen.

Anything else, and you’re building walls while waiting to die, probably in denial that it’s gonna happen.

So are you going to wait until you drown?

Or are you going to swim while you can?

Pools are for swimming.