When it comes to capturing fear there is one movie I told my daughter to watch and that is “Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara.” Every Saturday and Sunday these days I have swimming classes and that was again thanks to an apartment mate who instilled in me a spirit to remove my age-old fear of water. I value her for her grit and resilience. One person who consistently runs barefoot and looks forward to doing amazing things in life. The last I heard was that she was preparing for a triathlon. No wonder she is in the pool swimming to ace as a swimmer. They say fear of water is called ” Aqua phobia”. I have had this from my childhood. I had made one shot at learning to swim before the pandemic. I left it midway. Now this is my second chance to learn swimming. Second attempt to conquer my fears. So I was ready with my swimming suits and paraphernalia by 8.30 AM. For company accompanied by my wife who is equally scared of water. This was our second class and we were told to do floating and paddling with water. I decided to take note of feedback which came along as I was doing the floating part. The feedback was my shoulder was tight, my stroke-making with my right leg was not proper and I was not comfortable landing with my legs while breathing and with my head position up. I had a good laugh when my coach compared my actions to that scene in the movie ” Narasimham” when cine star Mohanlal makes an entry from underneath the water.
The biggest mistake we make in learning is comparing ourselves with others. I had made this mistake while learning to speak, running and now swimming. By my side, I had some intermediaries and experts and I started comparing. That is when my lessons from running, speaking, writing and dancing helped me. In each of these domains which I had encountered in life, I had similar experiences. That switch was flipped and re-contextualised with a goal. The goal is to fall in love with water and float and relax and take up your own time to learn all the skills in swimming. I went with my daughter who was also having trouble overcoming fear in the swimming pool. No amount of inspirational words will help you overcome that fear unless u start facing it. So I told her that I would come over and meet the coach and will give some input. I shared with the coach what my daughter was feeling. I was there for the next 1 hour. I noticed that she was frightened and her body was also shaking. In the morning I was practicing in the breadth of the pool. For the kids, they do the length side of the pool as they can learn faster. I noticed several times that she was holding on to the wall after some strokes. She was exhausted. The coach recommended a specific diet for getting more energy. She did her best. I am sure she would have also compared with other kids and most of them were younger than her. But this time she came out of the pool “Less scared “. That was evident when she told me that I wanted to come tomorrow along with you and do some practising next time around. That was a welcome step. I learned a very interesting lesson from the kids. All of them were enjoying the strokes and yes they were all learning in deep waters. I have started from shallow water and it will take me some swimming to get to deep. But this time around I am confident that just like the way I started with shallow water in writing a blog on Dec 12th 2016 and reached my 300th blog on Dec 31st 2024 which of course is a milestone for me.
I want to paraphrase what my swimming coach said today, “It’s better to perfect your kicking and hand movement and land perfectly on your toes mid-way through the lap rather than trying to complete the lap imperfectly“. There was a lesson for me in blogging as well. I took my own time to read and write blogs and the 300th one came along. As I am now bubbling up for swimming 2.0 I am also levelling up for the next phase of Blogging.
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