At The Water's Edge
Looking For Clues 6: When the Weird Stuff Started
So, at last, the nightmare was over. I was exactly where I wanted to be. Or so I thought.
During the vacations of the "university" years, after coming back from travelling Europe, I had started teaching swimming. This had all happened by accident (although I was qualified from when I was about seventeen) when my father's osteopath mentioned that she was looking for a swimming teacher for her children. As a result, by word of mouth over a couple of years, I had enough families and friends of families to teach swimming and make a living over the summers. (This by the way largely informs the way I want to operate now and not in this social-media age tendenancy of "liking" so that those "liked" will "like" you. When I start to get whatever I'm doing "right" I know people will come.)
Sometimes during the day, I'd have spare half-hours and rather than just sit around chatting to the lifeguards I would swim. I think after all the hours I had spent in the pool training as a competitive swimmer as a teenager (again something I was relatively good at but if I'm honest not passionate about) it's ironic that I don't think I was ever as good as when I would swim when I was a swimming teacher. I think that was a result of a combination of things. Firstly, perhaps as Richard Bach has said, you teach best what you most need to learn and I was beginning to understand swimming better once I was teaching it. Secondly, without the pressure of being competitive, I was able to experiment with my strokes and find what worked best for me. In the competitive environment there was never that "space", just the quest for fitness and speed. I think I only really started to enjoy swimming when I started to teach it. (Okay, a bit of a light bulb moment here as I reread this in July 2013: I'm not pushing so hard at the moment and yet a lot seems to be falling into place!)
One of the benefits of the life I was living was that I was reasonably fit and I guess because I was fairly strong cardiovascular-wise, I was also a reasonable runner. And so, in addition to the swimming, it wasn't unusual for me to finish the day with a run on the heathland near where I was living with my father.
On one of these evenings I went for a run along my normal route which would usually take about 45 minutes. And then something strange happened. Towards the end of the run, instead of being in my usual state of exhaustion, I felt more energised than I ever had before. I actually started speeding up and it felt as if I was sprinting for the last 15 minutes. For those of you old enough to remember the TV show The Six Million Dollar Man (1:20 of intro) well, I imagined I looked like him! The weird thing was that it felt completely effortless and very easy. In fact it didn't feel as if I was present in my body at all and yet I was fully aware of myself. Indeed, it felt as if I was watching myself. I got to the end of my normal route and then took the 5min walk home although I felt as if I could have continued forever.
When I got home I went straight to my room. I decided to lie down on the floor. I was puzzled by what had happened. Was it all in my imagination? Was I going crazy? As I lay flat on my back, I'm not sure if I drifted off into sleep or went into some sort of meditative state but I got this sense of my mother saying "Go back to university"! I didn't imagine her saying it, just had the sense of her saying it. I suspect I would've been open to any sort "psychic" communication from my mother over the fifteen years since she had died, but up to that point I had never even imagined such a thing taking place. And I'm not saying that it did that evening but surely if I was going to imagine her communicating with me, she would have said something I wanted to hear?! "Go back to university" must have been pretty much the last thing I wanted to hear.
I got up, dismissed what had just had happened, called myself an idiot and made myself a cup of tea.
