A poem I read the other day said that people under water do not know up from down. Seems unbelievable, but it's true. I know from experience.
So this post. It's from something I wrote some years ago.
Pardon the varied spacing and such.
It's one thing to catch the wave and ride it in. There's a technique to it, of course, but that is not what this is about. This is about when you don't catch the wave.
When
you miss it you miss it, and one of several things can happen. Maybe you are not low enough in the water or
don’t swim hard enough and the wave moves too fast and gets ahead of you. In that case you just float up, watch it
break, and start looking for the next big one.
Or
maybe you can’t get out to it in time and it begins break on you. In that case, if you can get your breath, you
dive through the wave, right below the top of it, and you’re okay.
Otherwise, it takes you under, and, in that
case, you are “taken” in the worst sense of the word. Time slows then as you are tumbled, churned,
rolled over and over, thrown to the sand, which is the only way you know down
from up, unless you open your eyes and catch one glimpse of light above the
water’s surface. There it is, you think,
there’s the top, all the while holding your breath, needing air, fighting for it, for control, for a way up and
out, but fighting does not save you.
It’s the wave, as if it has had enough of you, has taught
you something, perhaps, and simply lets you up.
And when you break through the water and open your mouth wide to grab in
air, you look around and see that everything and everyone looks the way they
always did, like nothing at all had happened, and no one knows you are not the
same person who went under. But you’re
not, because you’ve been down there in panic, thinking your life was ending . .
. within a breaking wave on the Santa
Monica beach you know well so close to your home and yet not there with your
mother or anyone you love or might love if you could survive and your life shouldn’t end in such a stupid
way with your bathing suit full of sand your mouth shut so that you can’t cry
for help or shout against it or say anything to anyone and your eyes shut so
that you can’t even see the end coming . . . under water, but actually
becoming a new person with this forced immersion, this sudden, ceremony-less
baptism.
And
if you come out of it a new person, if the wave teaches you, what do you
learn? That you are not invincible? That the wave has a will of its own and your
will cannot interfere there? Perhaps you
learn not to fight but to relax and give yourself over, that some things—many
things—are stronger than you and you are small against them. Or perhaps you learn that whereas you thought
you were strong you are not or maybe that you are actually stronger than you
thought because, after all, you came up and walked away. Perhaps you simply learn to value life and
breath.
