Swimming, at least for me, is simple. So simple that I see no difference between my swimming and meditation. In the water, my mind and body are free to take a break from each other–so long as I don’t bump my head at each end. So far, so good.
The Buddhist sense of self is a bit tricky to grasp. Neither the mind nor the body is in your control. The official line is the the Buddhist has no sense of self but I believe that’s a translation error. It makes more sense to say that the Buddhist has no desire to possess himself.
Now that you’re a bit bewildered, I’ll explain.
Understanding why we don’t truly control our bodies is simple. We are born. We get sick. We grow old. We die. If I had any input on any of that stuff, my answer would be a thorough rejection of them all. But I don’t have a vote on this stuff.
Understanding why we don’t truly control our minds is more complex. If you control your mind, why have your thoughts shot in 20 different directions before this question ends? The Western definition of mental illness is pretty steep. In the US, you can be a complete menace to society with a rap sheet a mile long and still not get classified as having any mental problems. The Eastern definition is orders of magnitude more conservative and could be described as severe by many. The fact that your mind has been shooting all over the place while reading is considered mental unrest, even illness, under the Eastern paradigm.
If you ever meet a Buddhist that says his religion is “cool” or “easy”, then you can rest assured that you are speaking with an ignoramus at best or a charlatan at worst. Buddhism has no dogma but requires serious discipline. The kind that some people would classify as “no fun.”
Back to mental equilibrium, swimming, meditation and all that stuff.
Letting go of the mind and body in meditation is also letting go of all desires that burden the mind and body. Your wants for strength, beauty, agility, charm, intelligence or whatever you perceive as your desires will result only in suffering because these wants are illusions that can only exist in your mind. Accepting what can’t be changed leads to happiness.
Going to the gym will only symbolize denial of the reality of having a peripheral neuropathy. If I went to the pool every day with the objective of “getting stronger”, I would be in the same state of denial. The denial, specifically, takes the form of desiring to control something beyond my control. As I mentioned earlier in this journal entry, the swimming is meditation; a timeout of a couple hours between my mind and body.
Today, however, I did something besides swim. The sky was overcast so I thought that treading water would be an interesting exercise. It’s very difficult to get good range of motion on my trapezoidal (upper back) muscles outside of the pool. The environment was safe with nothing to lose really. Just to know my thoughts while treading in a 17 ft. deep end would be worth it by itself.
Treading water across an Olympic size pool is about a hair’s width away from insane. When I swim, it’s a glide. Laws of physics provide tremendous assistance with an ordinary swim. When I tread water, though, the law comes after me. To put the difficulty in terms of time, I can lap in just over 2 minutes. A half lap treading takes 10 minutes easily. Needless to say, my grand total of the tread experiment was one lap. Nowhere close to the 40 to 50 laps per 90 minute session that I get from swimming.
I strongly suggest against people trying this themselves. There’s a reason that people die trying to do this in the ocean. I suppose that like many other things in my life, there is no physical explanation for why I can do something like that when a 50lb kid is grabbing the edge for fear of death and shouting for his parent for no real reason. It’s water.
I guess it boils down to the fact that water doesn’t kill, karma kills. Is it a combination of good karma, sheer willpower and a fuck-you-I-don’t-care attitude that propels me forward and literally keeps my head above water in more places than just the pool? If my karma was truly a mess, I’d be in serious shit or not here at all.
As it turned out, treading water was an interesting meditation session in addition to draining me physically. There will be more Buddha speculations in future entries. For now, I must sleep.
