Embracing the strange pleasure of winter open water swimming
I will always feel grateful for Mark Medley at The Globe and Mail for letting me write these literary essays for Canada's most widely read newspaper (excepting Sundays). I will send him and idea and the first few sentences and he writes back, "When can you have it to me?" Often it takes a while to publish--the opinion section is necessarily heavy with responses to news, scandal, and political disagreements--but somehow they do. An editor like this is a dream for any writer, and I have been so lucky to find it in Mark.
"...Kick. Pull. The water feels thick. Cold molecules bunch closer than warm. Am I sensing this? I move, look, move again, deaf to all but my raspy breath. It is thrilling. How ignorant we are, thinking we recognize our world. Have you ever dreamed you could poke your finger through reality and tear it open, revealing a world completely new? That is how it felt to put my face in the water.
But soon, my world pulls back. Fingers numb: pinkie first, then ring. Ears prickle. I realize I cannot feel my back side. My annoying humanness. I am an interloper, and my visa has expired. It would be easy to ignore these warnings, to keep going just over to there, and there and just there, to see that one last thing, like scrolling through Instagram, one more dopamine hit...."
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