Why We Swim

I'd recently read Why We Sleep, which was an excellent dive into an area that is so much more interesting than I'd expected. I was hoping this might be as illuminating. It was not. There's no interesting insight or analysis or gripping stories. Instead this is a series of disconnected conversations with people the author has swam with. There's one story about an Icelandic human seal which is semi-interesting. Once that's over the rest of the book starts to feel like the author searching unsuccessfully for something interesting to justify writing a whole book. She goes through history to find famous people who liked swimming and then set that as maybe the reason they were successful. Implying, in an extreme, that whilst Einstein couldn't swim, he thought walks were helpful and liked to be by the sea, so that's sort of an interesting story about swimming, right? It's not the style of writing that's the problem, but the content. This book does not answer Why We Swim; instead it's a rambling unstructured set of conversations. That's fine, it can work if the content is great. It's not.

very good, even better than I expected

Since February, after having had the chance to enjoy the pleasure of losing myself in the waters of a pool, I’ve been craving getting back to swimming, this time not as a competitive sport, but as a therapeutic means to connect with my inner self. And then the pandemic broke in March. In Why We Swim, Tsui manages to capture the pleasure and detachment from the outer world this antique activity provides. Here are some quotes where you can see what I’m talking about: 🌊 “For me, the story of swimming is also one of adaptation. We work to inhabit this element [...]. For most of us today [...], survival as motivation, though, has given way to sport. Competition is how we can experience the adventure of assessing and moving through an attractive but decidedly inhospitable environment. It is only with sustained effort that we can master it." 🌊”Three decades of swimming, of chasing equilibrium, have kept my head firmly above water. Swimming can enable survival in ways beyond the physical." 🌊”I begin to realize that the physical repetition can be a kind of meditation that transcends the simple goal of winning a race." 🌊”She realized that she could lose a race and still have it be a perfect swim [...], how failure is a critical stepping-stone for success— and how not being afraid to fail helped her to believe that she could accomplish the goals she set." 🌊”Rush, and you go slower. It’s the paradox of breaststroke. Ease up, though, and you stretch, like taffy. Cut the quick bobs, and you’re pulled along, effortless, smooth as the hull of a boat cutting through early morning glass on a river. That frog kick, working without splash underneath the surface, is your secret propeller. [...] In a modern world that is so obsessed with speed, it’s a good reminder of what’s possible when we slow down."