I thought I couldn’t swim. Not really swim, not the official way, with arms moving and face coming up out of the water to get breaths of air, all the way across the pool. I had lots of lessons as a girl, and I learned the basics of floating and enjoying the water, but I couldn’t ever master that breathing part.
I thought I couldn’t do it.
It turns out, I couldn’t do it without practice.
I figured this out just now, several decades after I had given up. We recently joined a gym, and then I saw the sign-up for swimming lessons. “I’m not a beginner,” I said to the aquatics guy. “Will it be a waste of time?” He explained that the classes were small (4 max) and I could ask the instructor for what I wanted. I paid my fee and showed up with newly-purchased swim goggles, with some awkwardness and quite low expectations.
And then in the middle of my third lesson, I was swimming across the pool, with arms moving and face coming up out of the water to get breaths of air. It wasn’t pretty, and I still have a lot to learn. But what a victory, to discover I can do it, when I was so sure it was hopeless.
As I reflect on this experience, I think the difference is practice. I’ve been practicing. As a girl, I didn’t have the luxury of access to a pool, to really work on what I was learning in my lessons. Now I do. The pool is open all day long, most days, and I have some freedom to get there. I’ve been there three and four times in between lessons. (At my second lesson, my instructor Von watched me do a few things we had learned, and then he asked, “Have you been practicing?” I glowed!)
You know how you learn to breathe while you’re swimming? You practice breathing at the edge of the pool. In through the mouth and out through the nose. You practice it just standing up, in the air, and then you bend down to the water, keeping your left ear in the water as you rotate your head up to the right to breathe in, and down into the water to breathe out.
At first, I couldn’t breathe out. The pressure of all that water felt stifling. “If it helps, breathe out through your mouth, too” Von said. I tried, but that day I just couldn’t do it. It didn’t help that I had a cold. “You’ll get it,” Von said. I wasn’t so sure.
When I came back to the pool on my own, I held the edge of the pool, trying what I had learned. I couldn’t do it. I did it in the air. I bent down into the water. I just couldn’t get it. I began to wonder what repressed childhood trauma was associated with this exercise of breathing and water and blowing out all those bubbles.
And then, I did it. It was the umpteenth time, and I don’t know what was different, but I did it. It suddenly felt like something a person could actually do. Something I could actually do! To my great surprise. And delight.
Practicing—trying again and again, and persisting past failure—turned out to make a difference. It’s funny to me that this was a surprise. I’m the girl who plays the piano! No one learns to play the piano with any facility without hours, and hours, and hours, alone at the piano, trying and trying again, and again. And then going back over that piece from the beginning and noticing that other tricky spot that you have to fix, going over it again, and again.
As a piano student, I had a strategy for those parts that were stubbornly hard. If I could play that set of measures correctly five times in a row, I could be pretty sure I had it down. It wasn’t uncommon to get through them perfectly three times, but then falter on the fourth. It was maddening when that happened on the fifth time through! But I’d start over, and eventually I’d get to five, and move on to the next thing.
I like the way we use the word “practice” in the world. We don’t just practice for music lessons, or some other thing we’re learning. We practice law. We practice medicine. We practice politics (not always very gracefully). Some people talk about practicing kindness, or mindfulness, or gratitude. (I suppose some people practice cruelty, too, but I’m relieved that term doesn’t auto-fill when I Google search this subject.)
I think of myself as always practicing preaching. “I am becoming a good preacher,” I have said in the paperwork we submit for an annual meeting with our clergy supervisor. I’m forever practicing. I think we all are.
Practice becomes helpful in a world where culture changes. For instance, some friends have begun asking us to use the pronouns they/theirs/them because the binary “he” and “she” do not fit their gender identity. As I began to understand this reality, I appreciated those who suggest that we practice. “I went to Emma’s place and they showed me their new table.” “I went with them to the ballpark and they got us a couple of hot dogs.” This wording may feel tongue-twisted at first, but as we practice, they’ll become just regular to us. Go ahead, try it a few times. Make up your own phrases.
See?
Did you try until you said it smoothly five times straight? Good for you!
That thing we thought we could never do, or feel comfortable with? Maybe practice is the thing that’ll get us over that hump. Who cares if someone wonders at our sputtering there by the side of the pool, or if they tire of us attempting those same notes over and over at the piano?! We’ll be the ones reveling in this new skill or facility or delight once we get it figured out. What joy.
Practicing is on my mind with the release just last week of The Fools’ Manual, a study and practice guide for my book Foolish Church. The heart of the Manual is practice. The Manual includes “practicing foolishness” prompts to help us practice seeing past people’s scars, and setting the right boundaries in our relationships with other people. Practicing includes thought experiments and talking out loud—sometimes through role-playing—in ways that will teach us to be more of the church we always meant to be. We’ll practice loving our neighbors in ways we didn’t realize we were missing. You’ll hear more about this as we practice together! #FoolishChurch
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