Growing Versions

I was filthy. My mind was cloudy and overworked, my spirit was spoiled and cramped. I took a forest bath and came out clean.

Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”                                                                                               ...

Kids and matches together are considered inadvisable. However, there is a lot more to learn about fires than just about how they can burn you.

Sometimes we end up in a place that we have not chosen but ends up being a good place to be in that moment . I ended up in Winnipeg Manitoba earlier this week and it stretched my mind in really unanticipated ways.  Manitoba is part of the Prairies. It is flat. The only hill I saw I told was a hill because it used to be a garbage dump.  Being on prairie land, even for a few days, had an interesting affect on me.  It helped me flatten my mind and read it like a map.  It helped me determine my longitude and latitude, which with all the hills and valleys and gullies and ocean floors that usually surround me, I was having a hard time doing lately.

You know what is really great about swimming? One of the main reasons I like to swim and be in water is that it lets me do things I cannot do or cannot do anymore in real life (IRL). My kids and I have a game at the pool called "do what you cannot do IRL".  We impress each other with manoeuvres that gravity prevents, but water allows. For example, my handstand days IRL are over (as I painfully discovered), but in water they carry on. IRL I cannot carry my kids anymore, but I can cradle them comfortably in water. I can hold myself up with one finger underwater and I can hold onto a rail and be parallel with the floor only in a pool. I can leap and lean way way back in water. Swimming makes things possible that are not possible on earth otherwise. Is there nothing swimming cannot do? How about you? What can you do in water that you cannot do IRL?