I’ve been working on my newsletter for over two years, and I’m four weeks behind. It’s never ending. Sometimes I feel foolish.
The news around the world is pretty soul crushing. People online can be really tough and mean. Even with normal conversation online, the dialogue is not patient, and it’s not the right forum for almost anything it seems.
Sometimes I wonder what I’m supposed to do or how I could best be a good person. I feel really lucky, and often feel like I have squandered things. I’m also getting older, and I want to make sure I do a good job with the next chapters of my life. All the stuff most of us have to think about, nothing necessarily unique.
When I go into the bay, I force myself to hit the mute button on all of the noise.
When I’m not in the water, I have to reconcile religion and spirituality and philosophy and try to boil the ocean (no pun intended), to constantly define who I am and what I believe in. And I feel the need to solve the grand mysteries of the universe. But when I’m in the water, I suddenly focus on the quiet and the natural order of things.
Whether the news around me has been wonderful or horrible, I realize everything is happening all at once everywhere and always has been. Everything compresses onto the point of a pin.
It’s like the big bang or a quantum physics experiment where everything is true all at once. All of the good, all of the bad, all of the joy, all of the pain, all of the despair, all of the hope, all of the fear, just gets compressed into a single atom of thought.
And my breath and myself disappear and become one into the fabric of the universe. I don’t think about death or mortality. I become fully at peace and quiet.
Today, the water was 33 degrees and the air was 19 degrees. After about six minutes in the water, my muscles start to become gelatinous. It’s somewhat terrifying, and it’s important to start paying attention.
I do not recommend that anyone try this unless you’ve done it for several years and kept detailed logs and you never try any new records without someone with you.
Today, Chloe came with me and sat in the passenger seat and kept watch over me. Even though I’m a couple of hundred yards out in the water, she can see me. We sync a timer on our phones. Choe knows if I don’t get up after a certain amount of time, she needs to call for help.
Inevitably, when I got back in the car tonight, I was feeling at peace and happy. My body is in such a state of shock that it just doesn’t process anything other than what’s immediately in front of it.
It’s truly somewhat of a shock therapy or masochism, and becomes euphoric with all of the endorphins.
I found myself exclaiming to Chloe that all of my anxiety was gone and everything was going to be okay.
Briefly muting the world and coming to peace with even the harshest things in life, including our helplessness and the inevitable wreck of all things we cherish is freeing.
“Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string. Accept the place the divine providence has found for you, the society of your contemporaries, the connection of events. Great men have always done so, and confided themselves childlike to the genius of their age, betraying their perception that the absolutely trustworthy was seated at their heart, working through their hands, predominating in all their being. And we are now men, and must accept in the highest mind the same transcendent destiny; and not minors and invalids in a protected corner, not cowards fleeing before a revolution, but guides, redeemers, and benefactors, obeying the Almighty effort, and advancing on Chaos and the Dark.”
-Emerson
It doesn’t mean giving up, but it means realizing the only thing important in the world is our personal ability to be generous, to love, and to be kind.
As I told Chloe that, I started to say that even the vultures know this… because I saw a vulture flying above our car… but as it came into focus, I realized it was a bald eagle, which is the symbol that always reminds me of my dad. Chloe got a front row seat at all of the hilarious yapping of a guy on the euphoric edge of hypothermia.
The last minute that I was in the water, my body was definitely getting gelatinous, and I want to reiterate that it’s very dangerous to push yourself beyond too far, especially with cold, since euphoria is part of hypothermia. It’s a bad time to make big decisions.
There are plenty of people who wouldn’t bat an eye at sitting in 33-degree water for 10 minutes. That’s what’s so important about knowing yourself and measuring these small temperature changes in water. 37-degree water is really not a problem. 33-degree water is remarkably harder on my system.
You could debate whether or not these are good ideas, but the fact of the matter is everything is relative. Doing nothing is not a good idea. Doing too much is not a good idea. There is no such thing as the right amount. We simply have to be ourselves.
I literally tortured the anxiety out of my body today in the bay. I am not sure if this was empirically tough or dangerous, but it felt like a good effort and was a very effective catharsis.
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