In Water

Information Overload and Respites

I didn’t take well to swimming when I was little. I remember, at a lesson my parents took me to, nervously stepping down the tile steps of the pool to my swim instructor, with a smile and faith in me that I could swim to him ten feet out beyond the steps. But there was no way I could. I remember him telling me that last week I had done it, only this was just a slight distance more, that I would be safe. I didn’t trust him. I was too young to really use logic and understand that I was safe. I was already too fearful, and I’ve found as I get older that fear doesn’t always come from reason. The chlorinated water was so bright as I looked at him, probably a teenager at the time, and I began to feel guilty, sad that I couldn’t do it, that I had in some way let him down, not just myself. That lesson ended with him walking closer to the steps, and a slight moment of panicked triumph, when, against the odds I jumped into the deep end, into his arms, and even floated there in the endless depths of the pool, thinking of piranhas and sharks. 

And yet, despite this fearful start, this uncertainty with the water and all the things that live in it, wild, and even though as I wrote that first paragraph that old shame filled my legs with weakness, that little boy is me, a person who now not only is annoyingly and unabashedly obsessed with surfing, but also cannot wait to jump into any body of water. That boy, timid of so many things but mostly the wide open and unknown ocean, is no longer afraid of that sort of thing. That little boy has become better accustomed to appreciating what he knows, and accepting what he doesn’t. 

Maybe it is the world itself, or just how I relate to it, but I find so much joy and thrill in the touch of water. I find peace and respite there that I can’t find in any other way. It’s a place to go when hiding away is all I want to do. It’s a home when what I see in the news, on my phone or Instagram or whatever, is too much to handle. Sitting in the water, especially in the middle of breaking waves,  places me exactly where I am, and there is nothing else. 

These moments of peace are critical, and especially in the age we live in. In just the past three years we experienced a global pandemic which is only just letting its grip go, along with upheaval of many democracies, the constant attacks on the United States’ already vague republic. We are bearing witness to climate change accelerating as the world grows warmer. Governments seem to be doubling down on systems of oppression everywhere you look. Economies are becoming even more fragile as an overconsumption of information online, true or false, confuses our judgments of what we believe, and sometimes misconstrues  our emotions and beliefs for facts. And now, after a horror was committed on Israel, they are choosing unabashed destruction and genocide on a Gaza population, the majority refugees from the creation of the Israeli state and nearly half of whom are under the age of eighteen, that did not commit the crime. What’s more we are experiencing this all through addictive media sites that prey on the fear of these events, that want us always trapped watching to validate our sometimes illogical fears and viewpoints.

So yeah, a break and a rest is okay. 

Sometimes I wonder if I were to get rid of my phone, what that would do. I would still hear all this news. The fear of an unrecognizable future would still haunt me, and yet in this fantasy that, without it I might in some way be more at peace, more calm, more able to engage in these issues less reactively. I wonder if part of my struggle with Instagram, with the internet more broadly, is not just the amount and speed of information coming at me, but the whiplash of it all, of switvhing from videos of archival footage of beavers parachuting out of planes to a teenager in Gaza, giving a tour of her house just before a bomb drops only a couple blocks from her home. 

But I don’t know, maybe that’s just an easy out. We can and should place blame on social media for this kind of overload of information that leads to paralysis, but the newspapers did the same in their time, only with static pages. And yes, without news and without my phone I would feel less distracted and uncertain and fearful about the world and its future. However it would only be, to a small degree, sticking my head in the sand. I would still have the same fear of climate change, about the world more generally, about a peaceful humanity, and I would certainly still need to jump into water. I would need to get rattled for a couple hours by some wave, only to remind myself, however briefly, that where I stand and just for now is right here. Maybe, with time, those things I feared, like social media, will pass like all feelings and I will wonder what it was about those things that scared me so much. And instead I won’t be fearful of the world, like that little boy who was terrified of swimming, and I’ll only wonder what I can do, in any small way, to change it. In time, we’ll see.