Swimming meditations

As I swam the other day, it was an easy decision to not use a stopwatch. After a couple of laps I seriously began to stress and internalize my fear of using the stopwatch. I denied it for another few laps, but with my fish-like movement in the pool I swam through a few of my own recent experiences with others who also could not try due to a fear of failure. This must be what it feels like to be afraid of trying- easy to deny, but oh, so controlling. I was afraid that the stopwatch would be too honest, tell me that I'm not fast enough, that I should stick to my day job, or maybe not even that. So in anger of my own fear I timed myself. Mostly, I'm convinced, I wanted to prove to myself that I wasn't like the others, controlled by my own fear, and that I could indeed try hard and work for something, or simply that I could try and that trying isn't failing. So I swam and thought of nothing else except how to make my kicks more shallow, my strokes more full, and my breathing sound like a steady beat.

Lately, many of the books I'm currently reading through, the verses that have been in daily devotions, the stories I hear, and the attitudes of my students have had a similar underlying theme - fear. In a blog I follow I recently shared with my students for a worship thought, blogger Allison Vesterfelt says,

"We tend to underestimate how much we will enjoy things, overestimate how difficult things will be, and when it comes to fear, we're far more scared of feeling scared than we are of any given circumstance."

Sometimes I wonder if we missed this lesson in school. Why didn't our teachers warn us? I think about my students, maybe I can help them understand the joy of faith doesn't have time for fear. What a more enjoyable way to live. Isn't faith such an unpredictable, spontaneous, confidence-building kind of light? I came across another quote by Anne Lamott that has added to my teaching curriculum. She says,

"As far as I can recall, none of the adults in my life ever once remembered to say, 'Some people have thick skin and you don't. Your heart is really open and that is going to cause pain, but that is an appropriate response to this world. The cost is high, but the blessing of being compassionate is beyond your wildest dreams. However,you're not going to feel that a lot in seventh grade. Just hang on.'"

She continues,

"I also learned that you didn't come onto this earth as a perfectionist or a control freak. You weren't born a person of cringe and contraction. You were born as energy, as life, made of the same stuff as stars, blossoms, breezes. You learned contraction to survive, but that was then. You have paid through the nose - paid but good. It is no your turn to reap."

We are all fat scaredy-cats, scared of being scared. We hurt because we're scared. We don't try because we're scared. We're depressed because we're scared. I'm not saying we shouldn't hurt, that's inevitable, when you love, which we're created for, you will always hurt. The heart attaches and attaches with all the veins and blood it has. And we're not in eternity yet, so we are bound to lose the love our hearts commit to. But we can't depend on time as the ultimate healer. When has a stopwatch healed the broken? It's only with time we're able to muster up the faith it takes to leap from the place where we hurt to new ground.