Fake

I'm down in Hilton Head, for Colgate University's senior week. I'm old now! Because I've graduated from Uni and am headed off to the real world (a.k.a. Medical school). As an aside, I called my mother today, MOTHER'S DAY!, and she said that she remembered studying more in college than in medical school, so HOLLAH! I think we're both at similar levels of intelligence, so I'm just going to assume Medical school will be harder in different ways, but hopefully I won't be as stressed out.

Anyway, it's warm here, down in South Carolina, and it's kind of reminding me of being down in St. John's, U.S. Virgin Islands. I had gone down with Katrina and her mom, and they were partaking in a swimming class that trained in the ocean, for the swimming part of triathlons. And it occurred to me that I had a relatively strong distaste of one of the people leading the class. It started because I felt like I could talk to them--I was a swimmer after all. But I had been a competitive swimmer, a varsity athlete. I liked swimming in the ocean, but I could never really enjoy swimming competitively in the ocean, right? I also stopped being a long distance swimmer, first when I gained 20 pounds of muscle as a fourteen-year-old, and second when I teared through my labrum as a twenty-year-old.

I don't really think there should be a great divide between people who swim long distances in the ocean and people who swim in natatoriums. Swimming is a beautiful thing, it really is. It forces you to use your entire body, it coaxes you out of gravity's grip. There was a singular, perfect moment when I realized how ethereal swimming could be. I was at the Olympic Trials pool in Indianapolis. It's a great pool, had some of my greatest races there. The competition pool is eighteen feet deep for fifty meters. It is entirely worthy of the Olympics. Ditto for the diving competition pool. Even deeper, though. I want to say thirty, but probably around twenty-two feet deep. The bottom was in-laid with black tiles. It looked like it had been built by NASA to test the mechanical provision of astronauts in zero-gravity. Swimmers cool-down after races by swimming through the diving pool. I guess I was wearing a racing suit and a new pair of goggles.I'm pretty sure they were pink, but what's important is that they weren't foggy at all. They couldn't have been. I dove head first into the cool-down pool--a no-no but I wasn't going to gently slide in, that's lame--and wow. For almost an entire second it seemed as if I was absolutely flying. It was the first time my mind had been completely tricked. I didn't notice bubbles or the walls or anyone else swimming anywhere--it seemed like it was just me, soaring thirty feet in the air above tiles. Amazing.

So swimming is an amazing thing. No questions asked. But then there was this man, teaching very well off adults how to swim in the ocean. I had no problem with the idea, of trying to become one with nature. I have an inexplicable fear/fascination with the ocean, such that I panic when I'm in it, constantly, quietly, but if I am given the chance to SCUBA dive, I immediately take the opportunity. The vast majority of my dreams take place near or in body's of waters, or in aquariums. I love fish, I love studying them. But I'm terrified of them if they swim too close to me. Inexplicable. If I was going to enter into a triathlon, I think one of the issues I'd have to address is this separation between me and the water. Fine. If you have enough leisure time to go down to the Caribbean, and if you have enough money to take swimming lessons, and if you have enough leisure time and enough money to regularly enter into Triathlons, then yes, it makes perfect sense for you, or anyone really, to want to take swimming lessons that preach achieving a oneness with nature. Fine. A little too hippy-ish for me, but I don't hate the idea, or even dislike it. I find it admirable.

But I didn't like the teacher. He used to be a swim coach for the Army, a Patriot League school. Very respectable. They consistently have a good team. And he was a sprint coach, so I felt like we had things in common. But the way he talked about his approach to swimming made me hesitant to trust him. Do you know why? Because he talked about his methods as if they were superior to other approaches. And not just, "Well I've found that doing so and so turned out to be better than anything I had ever tried before." No. It was more like, "This is the way everyone should do it and everyone in the game is doing it wrong. I'm going to write books about it because there is no other way one should swim."

Kill me now.

Swimming by itself is a very personal and individualistic activity. Making everyone swim the same way, or imbedding your own "progressive" methodology into people seems wrong. AH! And they wanted to stress that--that you. are. an. individual. you. will. individually. fall. in. love. with. the. ocean. But I couldn't hear that above the bragging.

He just seemed so fake. And this is what got me thinking. Are you still fake if you're fifty years old and have convinced yourself that what you speak is the only truth? Or does that just make you ignorant? My mother, for example (because it is mother's day after all), does not in any way strike me as a fake person. She sees the world and objectively judges it. I appreciate that about my mother, because I know that she is incapable of lying and is also incapable of feeling anything other than her own emotions. I may not always like what my mother does, but it is not horrifically complicated to figure out why she is doing something. At her worst, I still love my mother because of this. At her best, my mother is a real person who has real motivations and has lived a real life. She helps people, really, because she is a physician. She is a good person.

This man, this swim coach for leisure-loving individuals, was not a real or good person. Why? What was he doing with his life? He had jumped off the grid to live an alternative life style. He was good at sounding deep when really he was saying things that had no logical background.

Worried? Be worried. I am writing this simply as a warning: Experience real things and be a real person. Because in fifty years, if you've been living a lie, you won't even recognize it as a lie anymore. You will simply be faking it, and your reality will be unreal.