Floating on a Breath
“Solitude” by Lajward Zahra
Later in life, I began to swim again. At first, it seemed like a simple activity, but swimming quickly became an investigation into intimacy with my body, in what it felt like to sink, and in remembering how to float. I had been glancing down at the pool in the Y for months as I went up the stairs to early morning yoga. I hadn’t swum for years, but the thought of being in the water again tugged at me. I tried to talk myself out of it. It would be too cold, I thought, and then all the changing of clothes. Too much trouble, I said to myself. I’m not in shape. I don’t want anyone to see me in a swim suit. But I couldn’t stop looking at the pool. Finally, I bought a new suit. I found an old swim cap and flip flops for the shower and rolled up my scratchy beach towel. Early one morning, I went to the Y. In the mirror, I looked at myself with mild dismay. My waist was thicker, the tummy a bit curvy, but not too bad, I thought. Besides, I had convinced myself that I didn’t care. This early in the morning, there were only dedicated swimmers, and I had already noticed that they came in different shapes and sizes.
I climbed down the ladder at the shallow end of the pool. A shiver, a splash. I pushed off from the wall in a breast stroke. With those first strokes, the thought came: I’m home. Morning after morning, I swam, happy to be in the pool. At first, I assumed that I’m home meant that I was at home in the water, but then one day I realized that I’m home meant that I was at home in my body. I was surprised because I didn’t know that I had been gone. But swimming took me back into my body in a deeper way than I could have foreseen.
I grew up swimming. I learned to swim in a pond in Florida. Water lilies ringed the pond, their long stems reaching down into the mud, their pale flowers on the wide, flat pads. In the open space left for swimming, my brother and I dog paddled in the tepid, silty, pale gold water, flailing and kicking as my father shouted encouragement. After I paddled and jumped and dove and wore myself out, I liked to turn onto my back and float, breathing deep, quiet breaths and watching the cumulus clouds as the light faded out of the sky. On weekends, we sometimes went to the beach where my father taught us to body surf. I remember being scrubbed against the rose-brown sand, water in my nose and salt in my eyes and catching a glimpse of my father, running through the shallows to haul me up by the back of my swim suit and set me on my feet. We sometimes swam in public pools, too, but they were full of kids, shouting and leaping. It was difficult to really swim. Once in a while, we went to someone’s private pool. Then we stretched out luxuriously in the blue water like people sleeping in silk sheets. My brother and I also swam in a wild Florida river where the water was tea-brown from tannins but still fresh and cool. As a teenager, I sometimes swam in the shallows off a Maine island to which we’d sailed. That meant scuffing my ankles against barnacled rocks. But the water—when I finally got into it—was cold and pale green, and I could feel the swell of the tides against my body. Later in life, I swam in a clear lake in northern Maine. I remember that on one summer night, when the children were playing cards inside the fishing lodge, a few of us pulled our swim suits off and slung them up on the dock and swam naked, laughing.
As I began to swim again, pleasant memories flooded back: parents at the lake holding out dry towels; hot, wild Florida beaches; a skinny dip in northern Maine. It was as if the act of swimming released these memories. But the most powerful recollection was the sensation of being in the water. I loved the way the water touched every inch of me. I loved the way my body woke up and in its wordless way, remembered how to swim. A few splashy strokes and then the body settled into a rhythm, everything working together. It was a kind of physicality that had become rare in my later life. It is a bit like making love, I told my step-sister—not the beginning part but the middle part when your body settles into a rhythm and it’s just body and breathing and no thinking. Yes, she said, it’s just like that. I remember.
In the first winter, this is my routine. I like to be at the pool at 5:30 in the morning so before daybreak, I scrape the ice from my car windows. It could be the thin, stubborn layer that comes from marine mist over the bay, or it could be thicker, the result of icy rain or snow. It might take me 15 minutes or so to clear the windows, grousing beneath my breath as I scrape. But it doesn’t occur to me not to do this. A short drive and then into the parking lot, into the building, into the locker room. I’ve got my suit on already under my clothes so it’s easy to peel off the outer layer. When the lifeguard unlocks the door, I head for the lane that I prefer and slip off the wall and into the water. Each time that I do this, I am delighted by the first seconds of swimming. But the first lap or two are too fast. Then I remember to slow down. I swim until I am tired and my body has loosened up. Then it’s into a shower with deliciously hot water. Pulling clothes onto my damp body. Drying my hair just enough so that it won’t freeze in the winter air. A bit of chat in the locker room. Then home to black coffee and breakfast.
On many of my swims, swimming takes me out of my mind, that thinking, judging mind, and I remember the way we experience our bodies—if we are fortunate—in rare moments of unquestioning physicality. When we are young, we don't know yet that we can become separated from the body and all its information. We only swim or climb or dance. In these early morning swims, I re-experience some of that deep absorption. It is as if, suspended in water that holds me, my body begins to open up. In hatha yoga, they understand this opening as energy moving along the sushumna nadi, the central channel that connects the subtle energy centers of the body. In fact, to me, it does feel as if that whole column from my head down to my heels is clearing. I am balanced in the water; I am cradled by it. At the end of the swim, I pull off my cap and goggles and float on my back for a few minutes, smelling chlorine and watching the light flicker against the blue pool walls.
Then the world looks new to me, and I am different too. I can see that being in water changes people. When I am swimming laps, I am often in a mix of meditation and pure physical enjoyment. Sometimes I think, sometimes I plan, sometimes I pray, and often I do none of these things, and I just swim. But with the steady rhythm of my body moving in the water, I am made different. The water inside me levels with the water outside me, and I settle. It’s as if the long muscles of leg and back have been pulled straight and held, and then they’ve relaxed even as they have worked. I see this altering of mood in my friend who often swims when I do. I see it the handful of older folks who float in the therapy pool, a buzz of gossip rising above them. That change is there in the young man from one of the group homes in town. When he is lowered by lift into the therapy pool, his face splits open with a grin, and he crows with pleasure.
After my swim one morning, I walk into the locker room to see two large women, stark naked. One has her back to me, she is bending over and shaking out her hair and when she senses someone behind her, she turns around, and her big breasts swing toward me, wagging this way and that. She smiles at me and turns back to her daughter who is naked, too. The daughter is ample, rose-pink; her pubic bush is brown and thick. She beams at me, too. The women talk and laugh as they hand hairbrushes and towels back and forth, absorbing most of the space in this small locker room, their mounds of flesh shimmering and juddering. It could be a painting by a Renaissance artist.
I am not that comfortable being naked. I glance at my body; I begin to judge parts of it. It’s instant and in that moment of turning away, I am out of the body and into the mind. Even when I was young and beautiful, I thought—as many women do—that there was something wrong with my body. Now, I look back at old photos, and I am mystified. I was slender and fit, but in those moments, I thought that my body had to be subdued with diet and running. Perhaps it was also that I thought that becoming physically perfect might make me worthy of approval. Looking back, I remember years when my body and I were strangers. But when my children were small, I was no stranger to their small bodies. I washed them and dressed them, fed them and put them to sleep. I could sense when they were sick or frightened. Then, it struck me one day as I toweled off after a shower that I did not know my own body that well. With this body, I experienced nothing like the intimacy I’d had with my children. I could dress it and make it pretty. I could feed it. But I didn’t know it intimately. I’ve devoted more attention to lovers’ bodies that were less important and now long gone. But with my own body, I was rarely receptive to the information it sent me.
As I swam, I become more acquainted with this body which is uneven as most bodies are. As I swim, I feel that left leg and hip are looser, the right side is tighter. The right knee hurts when I kick a certain way while the left one is just fine. But, I thought, that shouldn't surprise me. I’ve struggled with the right leg and hip for years: stretching, physical therapy, operations, orthotics. From the scar tissue in the bottom of my right foot up to my right knee and then through the hip and up to my right shoulder blade, I can feel the tightness. If I look at myself in the mirror, I see that my head tilts ever so slightly to the right. As I swim, I feel the tension as if someone had run a thread up through my right side and then gathered it taut. In contrast, the left side of the body feels looser, maybe even languid, compared to the hard-working right side that always seems to be on alert. Was it something from birth, I wondered? Or the time I fell backwards down a ladder onto my spine? The time I was thrown from a convertible driven by a boy who was reckless as well as handsome? I walked away from that and from him, but what record was held in the body? Or was it giving birth, a long struggle, and then surgery? The falls on the ice here and there? The broken wrists and ribs? A car accident or two? I began to add up the ways in which my body had absorbed physical impact.
Then I began to wonder perhaps if the body holds the traces of the various physical shocks it survived, does it also hold the memory of betrayal and abandonment? I am not a survivor of sexual or war trauma; I’ve been fortunate. Yet, like most of us, I’ve had my heart broken in startling ways. We all know what it is to double over in grief. Is it possible that bodies brace themselves against sorrow and loss, but perhaps don’t let go as fully? That tension is stitched into our body. This notion is not new; many forms of yoga and bodywork and massage therapy are focused on releasing areas of tension and pain that a body has held. But some damage, I realized, can't be fixed.
The Japanese practice of kintsugi mends broken ceramics with gold, using a precious metal to make visible not only the history of the object but also the truth of impermanence. Everything can break, and it will despite our best hopes. For a while, I imagined myself and the people I passed on the street, walking around with hearts and bodies crazed with threads of gold but still functional and strong. But this poetic image although beautiful felt a bit static to me. After all, the phenomenon of this body is fluid. As I swam, I became curious about the information my body gave me in each moment. Pain here and there. Bursts of energy. The drag of fatigue. A flick of intuition in the belly. Could I learn to read this body in a particular moment? Sometimes when I swam, I began to feel the long fibers and bones of the body, not as I wished they were but as they were on that morning and on that lap. I tried to feel my aging, kintsugi body, but I often swerved into the mind. No surprise there. I loved my mind with all its thinking. But I realized that, over and over, I turned away from the wordless body with its stream of direct experience and went into the mind with all of its liking and not-liking.
In the late spring, I took a walk along the river. There was the bright sound of water running under and around the melting plates of ice. As I walked, I could hear my mind click in. If you walked faster, you’d burn more calories, my mind suggested. You could walk to the next bridge and then it would be 3 miles. You haven’t walked 3 miles for a long time. The mind continued in that vein. But on that day, I was able let go of the mind and sink down into the body. It felt the way it does when I am under water; the voices above become silenced or at least muted and what is left is body sensation. Out of that quiet mind and heightened awareness came the clear message, this walk is enough. A favorite Buddhist teacher teaches that mindfulness is the only way to compassion. Without mindfulness, we might have distant sympathy but not the deep compassion that moves our heart. So mindfulness can build toward compassion, and I also think that true friendliness can arise. In my walk by the river, I began to feel differently toward my knee. The knee was not only a kintsugi of bone and tissue, gleaming with gold. It was not only a sore joint with its history of treatments, not only a source of anxiety and frustration. Instead, it became the knee that was there in that moment. She and I were both participating in what I think of as my body, an animate, sensuous, imperfect set of physical conditions, constantly changing.
Often, I see the round, rosy women in the locker room, but one day, a much older woman has taken the locker next to mine. She is small and thin. Her pale skin is pleated with wrinkles. In the narrow space in front of our lockers, she stands aside to let me go ahead. Completely naked, she doesn't lift her towel to shield her body. She's thinking of something else and so she says nothing. I can’t say that she is beautiful, but she seems at ease in that aging body. I too would like to be at ease in my body, but these days, being truly in my body means facing the reality of my aging. It is a dilemma. Swimming brought me home to my body, but now I am painfully aware that I have come home not to the youthful body of my memories but to an aging body. It is healthy enough, still sturdy, still mostly fit, but it is not the plastic physical material that I once coaxed into beauty. Instead it has wrinkles, bulges, and sore spots. The skin shows sun damage from years on the beach. On any given morning, my body can be stiff, thick, dry, and in some places, worn or broken. I say that I accept growing older, but over and over, I notice that I turn away from the body, my mind full of judgment, and then I am full of plans to control and manage that body. Health is not the issue. Instead, I seem to be grasping at a youth that has long passed.
As I cling to shreds of body fantasy, I resist the reality of aging. I understand that I will never return to that youthful body, and so each change feels like a loss. There is resentment. After all the vitamins and yoga, I think, this is it? Really? I feel envy when I see someone with flexible knees running lightly downstairs. At times, there is also confusion as if I am waking up in a body that is strange to me. Is this old body my body? And if so, then who am I? Mind states, all of them, and none are pleasant. Living with them is like grit in the eye, a rock in the shoe, a nick on the finger. But worst of all and at the bottom of my mind is the fear I feel when I realize that someday this body in which I am at home will no longer exist. My mind jerks away from this fear. I can’t imagine a world without me in it. The thought of being separated from those whom I love is painful, and yet this separation is inevitable. When this fear arises—a moment in a sleepless night or during some mundane task—, it feels as though mud has been stirred up from the bottom of a pond, raising a silty, dense cloud. I feel as though I am sinking into that dark cloud, lost in it, suffocated by it, and a clear breath seems like the most desirable thing ever.
I love the energy of my body—the blissful body— but the fear is never far away. This is the dilemma. I can stay in my busy mind with its marathon efforts. I can fiddle around with various exercises and vitamins. Maybe those efforts at control even make me feel safer in some temporary way. I can live in that mind with my body as an object and try to avoid the fear of aging and death, perhaps becoming irritable and anxious as some older people do after years of sorrow and disappointment. Or I can lean into the aging body that for the time being, is still breathing, still aware. I wonder if I can be with that fear, maybe even relax into it.
For a while, these heavy thoughts persist as if more thinking could help me find a way out of this dilemma, but all I have are the morning swims in which my mind clears. It’s difficult to be unhappy as I swim, touch the wall, turn, and swim again. As I swim, sometimes I think about the many waters in which I’ve swum. But most often I like to remember the pale gold water in which I first learned and how I loved to float in it at the end of a hot afternoon, the clouds far above me and the light fading out of the sky. I never questioned how something formless, fluid, and infinitely variable could cradle me. In that innocent moment, the water within me balanced with the water outside of me, and I floated on a breath.
About the author
Jennifer L. Craig is a teacher of writing as well as a writer. For years, she taught at the University of Maine and then at MIT as well as various English as a Second Language programs. Her poems were published in regional literary journals in the 90s. She also has written two faculty development books and academic articles. Now, she delights in writing personal essays at a desk overlooking the Penobscot Bay on the coast of Maine.
About the Artist
Lajward Zahra is an emerging dynamic mixed-media painter and current college first-year student at Rice University. Specializing in acrylic and gouache, Lajward brings out the textures of life. In 2023, Lajward received acclaim as a Scholastic Painting Awards medalist, showcasing her talent on a national stage. She is also an essayist, poet, and journalist published online and in print in Business Insider, The Nation, The American Prospect, Prism, Rice Thresher, and The City Magazine, among others.