Living in the Now, Blue Mind, Sea Dreaming

 Living in the now is a state of being that my busy brain finds challenging — but I desire it. Swimming is an antidote for the existential anxiety from which I suffer.

In “Waterlog,” his celebrated chronicle of swimming through Britain’s waterways, the naturalist Roger Deakin described swimming as having a transformative, Alice-in-Wonderland quality; it was an activity that had power over his perception of self and of time. “When you enter the water, something like metamorphosis happens,” he wrote. “Leaving behind the land, you go through the looking-glass surface and enter a new world.” You’ve crossed a boundary, and the experience of life while swimming is intensely different from any other. Your sense of the present, he added, “is overwhelming.”

In its power to produce an altered state, the legendary long-distance swimmer Lynne Cox explained to me, swimming is like a drug. Sometimes we zero in on something with unparalleled lucidity, and we gain the ability to tune out the extraneous stuff; other times the focus is fuzzy, and one thought leads to another, without interruption. “Who needs psychedelics,” she said, “when you can just go for a swim in the ocean?”

What is it like inside Ms. Cox’s head when she’s swimming?

“It’s a state between a dream state and an awake state,” she told me. Maybe, she said, we can call it “sea-dreaming.” The rhythm of swimming lulls your body — which, well trained, seems to keep moving on its own — and your brain is allowed to go wherever it wants.

“Maybe you smell the coffee someone is drinking on the pier,” Ms. Cox told me. “There’s this awareness of the ripples of water, the pelicans sliding right by. Maybe your heart stops as you see a wave of silvery anchovies swimming below you.” In the hushed oceanic roar, you can choose to filter some things out and to focus on others.

Cognitive scientists have shown that water sounds — the rhythmic hum of the ocean, the rush of a waterfall — are calming to the human brain. We experience a drop in heart rate and blood pressure and an increase in alpha-wave activity — those brain wavelengths associated with relaxation and boosted serotonin — as well as creative thinking. 

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Much has been made of the walk as the instrument for big thinkers: Charles Darwin; Albert Einstein; Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, who famously rambled together and revolutionized our understanding of the psychology of decision-making. Less has been explicitly made of swimming — a similar kind of aid, more medium than tool — for channeling the inner life and improving the flow of thoughts.

The physical action matters just as much as the environment does. “The way we move our bodies further changes the nature of our thoughts, and vice versa,” the science journalist Ferris Jabr notes in an essay titled “Why Walking Helps Us Think.” It follows that the pace of swimming, because of its fluid continuity, encourages a specific kind of thinking. There are the same changes to our body chemistry in swimming as there are in land exercise: faster heartbeat, increased circulation, more blood and oxygen to muscles and brain.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/10/opinion/sunday/swimming-covid.html

By Bonnie Tsui

Bonnie Tsui is the author of “Why We Swim.”