Priya’s Reviews > Why We Swim > Status Update

Like running, swimming has a basic, elemental feel. Your chief adversary is the clock, and in this case, the water that you've got to work with to beat it.

Jay began to think hard about the way swimming stripped people down to their bare elements. "You lose even more of your normal identity than if you got dressed for tennis, for example. You're just skin, cap, goggles," he says. "The outfits for swimming are at the bare minimum - their other identities aren't visible. With two military people, you can't tell who's the officer and who's the enlisted man."

Back in Kajimura's office, we marvel at the idea of swimming in a pool cut into the Siberian ice. "I guess whatever doesn't kill you makes you stronger," Kajimura says thoughtfully, "I used to think it was all philosophical, but it might be true from a clinical standpoint."

I think of Charles Tomlinson's poem "Swimming Chennago Lake," which captures this state of being. He describes swimming as the act of moving in the embrace of water, but mindfully. To do so is to realize what it means to be, as Tomlinson writes, "between grasp and grasping, free."

If the complement to human biology is culture, then our strength is our ability to identify a problem and invent a solution.

I feel like this book is going to be more quotable than anything else - but it does feed into my fascination of swimming and the water.

"Swimming is about the mind too. To find rhythm in water is to discover a new way of being in the world, through flow. This is about our human relationship to water and how immersion can open our minds."

See. It is quotable!