Wrinkled, Flabby, Buoyant

I don’t swim. I never really learned how — not well, anyway. I’ve hung out in pools on hot summer days, floated around with friends, maybe kicked my legs around a little and called it swimming. But I’ve never felt that quiet, meditative journey through water that Roger Rosenblatt describes. I’m not old either. I’m a teenager, supposedly in the “prime” of youth, whatever that means. And yet, I understood his words. Though I’ve never experienced swimming the way Rosenblatt has, with rhythm and grace, his reflections didn’t feel foreign to me. Because what he finds in the water — the sense of being lifted out of time and returned to something more freeing — I’ve glimpsed in other places. A few weeks ago in dance class, I realized something. I wasn’t dancing for anyone, not for my mom, not for my teacher, not to prove anything to anyone or to impress anyone watching. I was just training, pushing myself to get stronger, more flexible, more in tune with the music and my own body. And somehow, that made it feel even more powerful. Every stretch and every leap felt like it was just for me - no audience or approval needed. There’s something oddly freeing about that, like I was taking back something that had once been tangled up in expectations. I found that quiet, full feeling that Rosenblatt finds in water, in the steady rhythm of movement, unexpectedly, in the quiet art of dancing for no reason other than it makes me feel whole. That’s what I took from what he wrote: not that I need to swim more, but that I should pay attention to the moments where I already feel that kind of weightlessness. The small ones that aren’t about getting better or showing anyone anything. Just dancing, or resting, or sitting with a song and letting it play all the way through. No purpose, no need for performance. But maybe that’s the whole point, that we don’t always need to do things for a reason. Sometimes, just being there, in the moment, is enough. We all need a place like that to feel young again, and mostly, to remember what it means to exist without explanation. Perhaps, there is no need to chase meaning all the time, and perhaps, the meaning will find us in the floating, in simply allowing ourselves to be.