Jumping in the Deep End

Where I live, the Chinese people can’t swim. A few of them will tell you otherwise, but they have actually just misrepresented themselves. What they mean when they say, “I can swim,” is that they can stop themselves from drowning in waist high water. The inability to swim is largely due to people never genuinely trying to learn. There is a river near here, but as I said, the water is at most a meter deep. Nevertheless, the slowly moving current creates riptides that are apparently vicious enough to claim a handful of lives each year. There are a few public pools here, but the “swimmers” who frequent these pools just spend all day clinging to the lane ropes like a flock of crows on a telephone wire. After a quick flail and gasp, they might flap over to another lane rope, but that’s the extent of the swimming that takes place.

A Chinese kid asked me to teach him how to swim. He was trying to learn in the river, which by his “logic” was the right place to start. “The pool is too deep. If I can’t swim than I will drown… In the river, if I can’t swim then I can just stand on the rocks.” Oddly enough, the same survival mechanism that causes him to stay alive is the same one that has prevented him from learning how to swim. While flailing about on the surface, his feet instinctively shoot downward to look for something solid. When practicing swimming in the river, your feet will always find the rocks before your body finds its own buoyancy.

I told the boy that the solution to his problem is strangely enough to just jump into the deep end of a pool. With a lifeguard taking care to avoid a worst-case scenario, this boy will either learn how to swim or receive help and try again. When the ground is there to stop you from drowning, you will never learn how to stay afloat by yourself. This is often the solution to our problems, you need to throw yourself into the deep end, where you must learn in order to survive.