Why I know you can swim
(… but take zero responsibility if you drown)
“You learn to swim by swimming,” theologian Mary Daly says.
It’s exactly the kind of doxastic logic you’d expect of a theologian; Truth deduced by very belief in the act itself — the act here of course referring to swimming, a.k.a.: [verb] ‘to move in water by movements of the limbs.’
Following Daly’s theory, using your limbs to move across water should engender the blissful act we know as [noun] swimming. Logic that is all fine and good… in theory. That is, because it implies a belief in the very act of swimming itself. Which I do believe. And perhaps you do, too. But the truth also is that a large part of adults out there on this watery planet don’t. Or at the very least, don’t extend the logic of [verb] swimming to an attribute of their nature [adjective].
“I can’t swim,” such grown adults will say. As if there were two types of humans: the swimming versus non-swimming kind. As if the latter were creatures made not of flesh and bones like you and I, but a rare breed made of bricks.
Here’s where it gets even more interesting though: this is a declaration I hear time and again from friends — flesh and bone friends, not brick friends. Naturally (to me) it’s a statement that always gives reason for pause because like Daly, I believe that you can swim by simply swimming. So if you wish to swim, then simply swim… . But these friends very much wish to swim and have all tried swimming, and yet they call it drowning. They’ve tried to move their limbs in water and float weightless but instead have swallowed seas. So, now they insist they can’t swim. To which I have to logically reply: physiologically speaking, a healthy human adult can’t not be able to swim. It’s all very circular, this pattern of can / cannot. And it gets tricky because both sides are right — to a degree.
Why I know you can swim
It’s simple, actually. I know you can swim because we were born of water — just that most of us have forgotten this.
Consider the facts…
Humans are intimately linked to the sea. On a planet that is 75% water, perhaps this comes as no surprise. But it goes beyond just proximity, it goes to necessity. Scientists believe that what likely helped fell a revolution in our intelligence was the seafood our distant ancestors began foraging from the sea in Africa. We harvested food beneath the waves — food that had long chain poly unsaturated fatty acids critical for brain development — and we did this holding our breath, diving deep (otherwise called breath diving or free diving). This act of going deep was critical to our intellectual development. But the key is that physiologically, we were perfectly adapted to go there. And this is what world champion free diver William Turnbridge calls our “aquatic potential” as a species.
Humans have diving reflexes that are similar to that of a seal. When we dive under water, a series of physiological responses are triggered; chief among them, that oxygen is preferentially distributed to the heart and brain in order to preserve them because, well, they’re pretty damn important. Notable also is that your airway snaps shut (a reflex that helps keep fluid out of the lungs) and your heart rate slows (thereby delaying your need to take a breath).
Honing this evolutionary reflex, Turnbridge has managed to dive a record-breaking depth of 102meters on a single breath — and back. This same reflex is what’s also helped keep him alive when he’s oft lost consciousness under water in his gruelling and oxygen-deprived trainings. As he writes almost too nonchalantly, “Blackouts are clearly undesirable, but neither painful nor (according to extensive medical research) damaging.”
The longest breath hold (apnea) record sits at 24 minutes 3.45 seconds. Aleix Segura Vendrell did that while floating face down in a pool. Vendrell’s record is absolutely mind-blowing considering most of us can’t even seem to hold our breath long enough to let the scent of an unwelcome fart waft by, but especially so when compared to our human-like aquatic compatriots: dolphins, which typically hold their breath for 8 to 15 minutes.
While Turnbridge and Vendrell might be the super humans among us, their aquatic abilities go to show just how well the human body can be adapted to the world of water.
“a revelation: that we can belong underwater, as a marine mammal, as a sea creature; that here is a world waiting for us to discover it. grown adults resemble wide-eyed children, giggling into their snorkels, in the face of that discovery.” — william turnbridge
… But take zero responsibility if you drown
The scary thing is that despite the amazing aquatic prowess we are all born with, turns out that non-swimming humans are actually quite common. In fact, they may very well be the majority of our population. In the US, for instance, it’s estimated that over 54% of the population can’t swim. Of the ones that try, 10 will die from drowning each day. In New Zealand where I live — an island nation made up of “11,000km of coastline, 525,000km of rivers and 3820 lakes” — seven out of 10 kids can’t swim. At my local pool in Auckland, adult ‘learn to swim’ programs are a weekly event.
I didn’t know this. I didn’t know that so many humans had lost touch with our aquatic nature. And as an avid swimmer it’s hard to fathom that one would need to learn something that is seemingly so automatic and natural (to me). But ultimately, as unnatural as it may feel to some, it is very likely that if you swim you will. And so, more than anything I’ve realised that ‘learning to swim by swimming’ means — rather than literally ‘moving through water with movement of our limbs’ — learning to swim by doxastically believing in our aquatic potential. Removing the artificial boundary between [noun] swimming and non-swimming humans / can and cannot.
So the next time some one tells me they can’t swim, I’ll say what is true: that I know you can. That you have great aquatic potential. That you are part seal.
But, I take zero responsibility if you drown…
Because, in order to swim you must actually swim.
