EVERYBODY’S SWIMMING - Brittlestar’s Weekly Newsletter - Issue #17
It’s Sunday. Lots of people have been or are getting vaccinated. Not out of the woods yet but I see the open fields ahead. Steady on.
EVERYBODY’S SWIMMING
There’s a quarry that you can swim in not too far from where I live.
It’s about 30’ feet deep and it’s billed as Canada’s largest outdoor swimming pool.
I’m an okay swimmer. I say “okay” now after my one and only trip to swim in the quarry. About 10 minutes into my swim in the quarry it quickly dawned on me that my swimming skills were really more like “hanging out at the side of the pool or by the dock” skills.
When you know there’s about thirty feet of water below you and about 30 feet of water between you and the nearest place to grab on to, you put most of your focus on not sinking.
I think most of us are trying to simply stay afloat and not sink in our everyday lives.
It doesn’t matter if that refers to money, emotions, health, or whatever. We’re all busy swimming.
I think it’s important to remind ourselves of that notion. So that we don’t feel we’re being intentionally ignored.
As the pandemic has shown, even if the messages are life and death, being heard and understood is a challenge.
It’d be like me swimming in that quarry, realizing that I really need to do more cardio and work on my upper body strength with a mild panic setting in, and having someone standing at the side of the water on dry land trying to get me to look at a graph.
”Great graph, probably but I can’t read it right now, I’m trying to not sink.”
If the person with the graph threw me a life preserver and then said, “Hey, look at my graph”… I’d be much more inclined.
So, if you create something or need to be heard by others, what are you doing to help them stay afloat?
I mean, everybody’s swimming.
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Not the quarry but still wet and scary (to okay swimmers like me)