This is Swimming

Yes, my title is cheesy. No, I couldn't pass that opportunity up. Other titles included: This is (what you get at) 1:40 am, This is Tired Personified, This is I Really Should Just Wait Another Day and Do This When I'm Alert and Coherent, and last, but not least, This is Life.

David Foster Wallace's commencement address was amazing; it captured the hectic, day-to-day, stream of consciousness, default setting focusing selfish views of our current lifestyles--our society. The main point of the whole speech (that I got out of it) is that we go through our lives, day in and day out, focused on ourselves, so much that we become complacent to life. We literally become so involved in our own life (I am aware that should be plural, but for the sake of parallelism), that we literally become complacent to life. Just like the fish didn't know they were in water, because that's all they knew, we forget we're living, because that's all we've done. That's really what I've been obsessed with all week; thinking about how we could forget about something so there. In fact, I wondered how I could apply this to swimming, so here we go:

Here's a story. It 4:30 am and a swimmer is on her way to practice, texting her other swim friends to make sure everyone else is up. Once she finally gets there, she heads into the locker room and exchanges her usual complaints about swimming and kicking and what will the set be today, oh I don't know, we did major stroke yesterday, cool, I hope it's not IM, until someone notices the clock and silently curses and reluctantly heads out to the pool room; she doesn't want to be last, so she hustles to change and grabs her gear and follows and stands by the deck and waits for instruction. The coach moseys on over, oddly awake for 5:00--she notes silently, and begins to explain the warm up. It's pretty basic so she zones out. Fast forward a painful hour and a half later: She's sitting in her first hour class, hating her coach and practice and swimming and oh my god this is so unfair, so she starts complaining to her desk mate and inevitably, she says, "So why don't you just quit if you hate it so much?" "Well...because..." She really doesn't know how to respond.

Well, because, This is Swimming. If you suffered through that stream of conscious, you can stick it out 'til the conclusion. The swimmer in this example (*cough* me *cough*) has become so complacent to swimming, that she's forgotten what it is. All of that pain and exhaustion comes with the territory. Anger and frustration come with life. You can change your outlook, as Wallace was saying, you can put yourself somewhere else other than first and most important. You can not be on your default setting in life like a swimmer is with swimming. It's difficult, as he also said, but a swimmer that's excited for a tough day will invariably be better than the swimmer that could barely get out of bed. As Wallace, I'm not here to tell you I've got it all figured out. I'm the swimmer that can barely get of bed, but I can tell you not to make this reality the hardest one to see. Don't forget that you are living, in life. Yes, we are constantly exposed to it, and it can be difficult to remember, but we have to not become complacent, because This is Life.

To completely emulate Wallace, I need at least one cliché: