Swim like a fish

So there’s a joke about me. I am Jamaican. I was born there and then moved up to America when I was 4 years old. Lived here all my life through humble beginnings. Either way, the joke is, I can’t swim and I’m from an island. I just never had the opportunity or funds to learn when I was young. But I knew how important it is to learn how to swim. Great to learn for survival and other things.

So I have been promising myself for years that I would learn how to swim but of course, kept putting it off. But things changed with the birth of my son. For two reasons, I want to be able to do something like that with him and I wanted him to be proud of me. Mind you he’s only 22 months but I wanted to because of him.

I would at times have a dream or nightmare of me “swimming” underwater and would swim right into the Statue of Liberty. I think I started having that dream when I saw the movie Ghostbusters 2. In that movie they brought the Statue of Liberty alive and walked it under water to Manhattan to beat the bad ghost. Anyway, sounds weird but that freaked me out.

Fast forward to now, someone guilted me and said what if you had to save Logan, my son or something. So my friend began teaching me. The number 1 problem I had to overcome was relaxing. Once I did that everything started to fall into place. One other thing that helped, besides constantly being in the water, was goggles. It might be strange but that helped the most to me. I was able to open my eyes and see the beauty underneath and also where I was going. If you are older and learning. Get goggles.

Even though I knew how important to being able to swim was important, I didn’t make it a priority. I’m happy I made time to learn. Today as of writing this I swam a total of .30 of a mile, according to my Apple Watch. I had to stop of course, just going up and down my friend’s pool. Now all I have to do is better my technique and learn to turn my head to breathe.

Don’t let age or anything be the reason you don’t do anything. You are never too old to learn new things. I believe you can’t teach an old dog new tricks because they are stubborn. But if you get rid of that stubborn attitude you can learn new things. Thank you so much to my good friend, Joan, for guilting me and teaching me. Always be a sponge, always be willing to learn and always getting better.