I led a workshop yesterday and brought up the riptide. Something I had written about a few weeks ago. How a rip current is usually less than eighty feet across. How it feels like the whole ocean has swallowed you when really it’s a narrow strip. And how the way out is sideways, not straight at the shore.
My friend Cathy was there. She’s in the ocean almost daily. She said the sideways part is right, but there’s a step before it.
You’re supposed to relax.
Not swim. Not fight. Not even redirect. You flip onto your back and you let the water take you where it’s going to take you, and the current carries you out of its own strongest part. It turns out this is what lifeguards actually teach. Flip, float, follow. I had been teaching the follow and skipping the first two.
There’s a reason. A rip can move at eight feet per second, which is faster than any swimmer alive. The people who drown are mostly the ones who exhaust themselves swimming for the beach.
The room connected with Cathy.
We had been talking about the thoughts that replay and replay and won’t let go, and I’d been framing it as a technique problem. Catch the thought. Redirect it. Shake it off. Swim sideways. All of them verbs. All of them things to do.
What if the move, sometimes, isn’t to swim in a better direction? What if it’s to stop swimming? To let the feeling carry you for a minute without adding a story to it, without thrashing, and trust that the current will let go when it’s done.
I think we confuse rest with giving up. Floating isn’t giving up. It’s the most efficient thing you can do in a current that’s stronger than you.
The panic is what drowns people. Not the water.