I signed up for a membership at my local YMCA a couple days ago, inspired by this post. The YMCA is full-featured, and remarkably cheap remarkably cheap by Bay Area standards, as far as I can tell. My plan is to start a strength training habit of some sort, but I haven’t done so yet. Instead, today I took advantage of the pool.
I was low on energy today, due most likely to some mix of poor sleep habits and the drain of ongoing emotional processing. Whatever the cause, with the clock approaching 7 p.m., I found myself lying in bed, ruminating on some issues in my life and staring at the overdue “Exercise” on my to-do list. Luckily, when the inspiration struck that I could solve both problems in one fell swoop, I still had enough motivation to get up and give it a shot. I grabbed my bathing suit and a towel, and walked down to the gym.
I’ve always loved being in water, even just like, standing in liquid. I like the coolness on my skin, and the gentle resistance as the water flows around my motion. I’m not a great swimmer, but efficiency doesn’t matter when cardio is one of the goals. I dunked my head under, swam a few laps, and treaded water for a while.
My main goal in going to the pool was to escape my thought loops. Reader, it worked like a charm. The brain is, first and foremost, a control system for the body. There’s less capacity for thinking when instead of lying still in bed, I’m engaging my limbs in complex motion. Stillness is not an option, while treading water. To stop moving is to drown. I Indeed, I started mentally composing this essay in the pool, including this very digression. but I did break out of my unpleasant rumination. I told a friend once that one of my main coping mechanisms for unhealthy thought patterns is to simply MOVE. Change my setting, use my muscles. I don’t always succeed in applying it when I’ve fallen down a rabbit hole, but when I do it consistently helps.
My experience of literal motion in the pool is an apt metaphor for motion in life, I think. You need to move, lest you find yourself in unpleasant and unproductive cycles. Your brain will always find a way to engage itself. Channel it towards what you value, so it doesn’t find more destructive outlets on its own. Treading water has a metaphorical meaning as well as a literal one, of course. Survival, effort going towards just staying in place. As I mentioned, I swam some laps as well as treading water. I found both activities to be similarly helpful in breaking me out of my rumination. It’s ok if you aren’t moving forward, so long as you’re moving at all. If all you can do is survive, then survive! But when your survival is secure, beware of the comfortable bed you’ve made. Push against the world and engage the capabilities you have, or risk finding yourself unhappily idle.
As always, reverse any advice you hear. Many people are in motion too constantly, leaving no time for reflection, and perhaps someday I’ll write a post about the virtues of stillness. However, with my accepting disposition and comfortable environment, I’m more likely to fall into the trap of idleness. If you’re like me in this regard, I exhort you to move, in both the literal and the metaphorical sense.