SWIM - The pool's edge

Today's little victory came when I had to jump into the pool during swimming classes, it's something that I've done before but the last time I did, it hurt my knees and from what I know now, I think it was because the water wasn't deep enough to carry my weight but I digress...

The teacher told me to jump into the pool and I think this is because he was trying to show me something. I'm not sure what exactly but it had to do with me losing my fear for water and to be able to see how my body behaves in water. Fear of doing things often stops us from rationalising, it stops us from thinking about if our fears were founded or if it was just our mind playing games on us.

So I stepped onto the "diveboard" (not exactly a diveboard but some kind of platform from which you get into the water). I was really scared but then I thought of something Robert Greene said about learning, he said, and I paraphrase roughly, that children are able to learn some of the most difficult things easily because they trusted their teachers and just followed instructions but we adults tend to overthink things before doing them and most times this prevents us from learning extraordinary skills. With this in mind I stepped forward and got into the pool.

I panicked for a half second or less and I discovered a few things :

1. my legs barely touched the bottom of the 2m deep pool.
2. As soon as my feet touched the floor I sort of bounced up.

After bouncing, I swam, using a floater stretched out to me by the teacher, to the edge of the pool. I couldn't believe it but I had done it ! I was so happy that I got out and did it again and this time I didn't even bother about the floater, the force of my bounce was enough to get me to the pool's edge. Yay me !!!

Last time we had classes, I had learnt to swim on my back using a floater and just flapping my legs, which was cool. So today I continued doing the same thing and I think I've gotten the hang of it now. The teacher now wants me to do the exact same thing but swimming on my belly, now that's a little more complicated because not only does my nose and mouth get into water thus inhibiting my breathing, it's also more tiring to flap my legs this way so I guess that's what I'll have to work on next week.

I'm slowly advancing but I'm getting there :D To think that someday I'll be able to say that I now do stunts while swimming is so exciting, I can wait until that happens. Or maybe not even stunts but just to say that I went swimming for pleasure or for exercise...