One of the things that I love about swimming, particularly swimming in the sea, is that it is an activity which is not so much ‘how do I look doing this?’ as ‘Oh, I love this!’ If you’re someone who carries around a yoke of (probably mildly irrational) self consciousness with you, this is a very big deal. Not always imagining that constant, critical audience; ready to jeer at your every move. When swimming somewhere that’s not too crowded, looking out at the horizon, I cease worrying about how I look and merely focus on how I feel.
I’ve tried to evangelise about this down the pub; about not worrying how something makes you look - how sweaty you become or what it does to your hair, I’m sure I’ve sounded tiresomely bogus but I’m just trying to spread the good news. Swimming makes me feel marvellous; at one with the world and more at peace with myself, it could do the same for you!
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| Marazion Beach |
From a young age I waged war against my body; I cruelly seized bits of it between my fingers and wished it away, I pinched it and hurt it. I starved and berated it, ignored it and tried to pretend it wasn’t there and still it served me as all of our bodies do. My body served me well - carrying me around, healing wounds and nurturing the human beings who grew within it. Why are we taught to hate our bodies so much? To try and mould them into some kind of impossible faux Platonic ideal, when the goalposts keep moving anyway? When I was young the ‘fashionable’ body shape for women was a flat chested, half starved ‘waif’, at this moment it seems to be a cartoon, Jessica Rabbit, hourglass figure.
I read somewhere that wanting to lose weight was very rarely about wanting to be thinner, it was about being acceptable to other people. And that is probably true of anything we want to change about our appearance - the wish to be acceptable to others - that invisible audience again. At the heart of this is wanting to be lovable.
I recently entered a micro story competition, the challenge was to write a 100 word story based on a picture. The picture was of a lighthouse, with the sun setting on the sea. It was a peaceful image filled with soothing colours. The sea was calm and still. I tried to banish the prosaic reality of the function of a lighthouse being to warn sailors away from the rocky shore and write about swimming instead! The image reminded me of an evening swim I’d had at Marazion Beach in Cornwall, near St. Michael’s Mount. The water had been wonderfully cool and silky - not bracingly cold and I’d managed to get to that happy state of Zen-like contentment. We were all sticky from our visit to a tropical garden that day and a swim was a perfect way to end the day.
Light on the Water
Nowhere to park in the whole of Southport. Trapped like wasps in our hot car. We get to the rocky beach at five and unpeel ourselves from sticky clothes. I wrestle with the shame of my bulging outline.
Picking over the painful pebbles we run into the sea. I plough through the oily shallows; gentle waves tugging playfully. The kids splash behind me and I pretend we're a family of seals.
Cool water. I send a silent prayer to my body - I’ve been so busy absorbing the disapproval of others that I’ve forgotten to appreciate the pleasure it can bring.
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| First attempt at capturing the scene in pencils |
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