Many years ago, I lived in a coastal town. In the summer, sometimes I would go with my neighbor to body surf. He would body surf while I would swim/struggle past the break, flip over, float on my back and marvel at salt water. One day the tide was higher than usual and was coming in about three-foot rollers.
I am a strong swimmer and an athletic human and managed to fight my way past the break, popping out into a little drift zone. At first it was fun to ride high up on the wave like a bathtub in a comic book, but that didn't last. My neighbor shouted over to watch out for the rip current, because it was right behind us. At that point I was probably in 30-50 feet of water.
I sensed the tide turning, was already worn out and decided to head in. Hot sand and a blue sky sounded nice. I remember thinking, "It will be so much easier to get back in, because I will just ride in on a wave..." Except I didn't take into account waves are reciprocal and tides turn.
I managed to get myself up to the break, but bad timing caught me in the middle of it and I couldn't get past it, which is when I started going through the washing machine. I was a rag doll thrown into a forward roll under water, and would barely surface and start stroking for shore and the tide would immediately come rushing back at me in a tumult.
Conscious I did not want to exhaust myself, I relaxed and let it happen, which is the best way to handle any kind of rip tide or rogue current. There is no fighting, it will win, so let it happen. I heard my neighbor shouting at me to just relax and keep swimming, and I knew eventually I would pop out on the shoreline, or a place I could swim from, so I protected my head and saved my energy and kept swimming when I could and stayed afloat where I did.
Eventually, I made it back to shore, suffering only abrasions on my palms and a few odd bruises. I remember lying down in hot sand on a warm towel and luxuriating in the lassitude particular to physical struggle.The blessing happened days later when I was at the pool swimming laps and I thought, I bet I can do a flip turn, something that had evaded me since I was a little girl in swim lessons.
Up to that point, I had been unable to make sense of the forward roll half turn under water in a flip turn without inhaling water. Having gone the break in a perpetual forward roll, I had a funny feeling I could recreate the same action and apply it to a flip turn. It worked. And just like that I learned how to do a flip turn.
It's one of my favorite swimming stories and I am sure I have told it before. Swimming (today) I was thinking about trust exercises and how, self-improvement-team-building-exercises generally schedule trust exercises with another person, when in fact, a trust exercise would be better served performed as self alone.
"Trust your partner," and "you don't trust me" or "I trusted you and you lied to me" and so forth and corporate group activities where the person has to dead fall into the arms of the person who will "catch" them and I was swimming and I was thinking about the coast and I was thinking, really, as trust exercises go, they ought to just throw a person off a wharf into 100 feet of water and tell them to swim to shore a quarter-mile out, or some other equivalent of survival and faith, because trusting another person means almost nothing. If I trust myself it doesn't matter. I trust I will take care of myself, and I trust I will take care of this or that, or you or me or life in general and so forth. Trusting "you" is almost pointless; a feel good exercise in futility.
Yes trust is profound and I'm not arguing relationship semantics, or the mysteries of faith; but the practical application of trust is best served, when I place my trust in self. Do I trust myself to make a better choice next time? Do I trust I can walk away if I need to? Do I trust that I will love with all my heart? Do I trustin my talents? Do I trust in something bigger than myself? Do I trust me?
My father will say, "faith is not knowing everything will be okay. Faith is knowing I will be okay." Because most of the time, everything isn't "okay." Life on life's terms isn't pretty and perfect and smiling ear to ear with a 1000 Watt day glow smile and nicely packaged for social networking. It's often quite the opposite. But that doesn't mean I fall down with it. It doesn't mean I just lie down in the break and let it roll me out to sea. I might swim smarter instead of harder, but I keep swimming. Faith isn't knowing everything will be okay, faith is knowing I will be okay. Do I trust myself? Yes, I do.
