One Midlife Crisis and a Speedo

by Darrel Bristow-Bovey

  I swim an eleventh lap, then just one more. I want to stop now – oh, stopping will be such a beautiful, rewarding experience – but before that I’ll just do one more.

  But something strange happens. I’ve never been past twelve laps without taking a break before, but once I do, instead of becoming harder, the swimming becomes easier. It’s still not easy, but it no longer feels like I have a filing cabinet on my back. I limp along until something even odder happens. Halfway through lap seventeen I find flow.

  I don’t realise at the time I’ve found flow: the point of flow is you’re not realising anything. Flow is an idea proposed by Mihály Csíkszentmihályi, which is probably why we call it “flow”, rather than The Csíkszentmihályi Proposition, or “Csíkszentmihályi’s big idea”. If Sigmund Freud had been called Mihály Csíkszentmihályi, we’d all still think that dreams predict the future and women should be hosed with cold water to improve their moods.

  “Flow” refers to that state of single-minded absorption in work, that pleasant, self-sufficient sense of being so lost in what you’re doing that time recedes and thinking itself dissolves. It’s similar to daydreaming and to meditating (although daydreaming and meditating are the opposite of one another), but flow’s better in one way because you’re getting something done.

  I refer to it confidently but actually I’ve never experienced flow before, and certainly never while working. When I hear people describe how they sit down to write and go so fully into another world that they even forget to eat, I’m filled with envy and dis-belief. I’ve never forgotten to eat while at my desk. I eat even when I’m not hungry. From the moment I sit down one part of my brain is always already ticking through a list of excuses to stand up again. Should I get food? Did I drink enough water today? How do you spell Csíkszentmihályi? What’s the most times anyone has used the word Csíkszentmihályi in a single chapter? I’m definitely not using this chapter for public readings, unless someone teaches me how to pronounce Csíkszentmihályi. Has the cricket started yet? Have I acknowledged all my sources?

  (Once in a previous book I quoted something Bill Bryson had written and that got me into plenty of trouble because I didn’t acknowledge it was from him. The thing I wrote was a paragraph of figures about domestic injuries, and then:

  “Consider this: every year more than 50 000 Americans are injured at home by pens, pencils and other desk accessories. How does this happen? I have myself spent many long hours at desks when I would have been grateful for almost any injury as a welcome diversion, but I have never managed to achieve actual physical harm.”

  I’m not exactly sure why I never acknowledged that he’d said most of it first – several reasons, probably, some stupid and some more stupid – but I suspect a small part of it was that it sounded so much like something I’d want to say that after a while I forgot I hadn’t said it.)

  Say, how many words is that today? Can I count the words from the last book? And how many words overall? Say, I wonder how many words I’ve ever written in my life if I were to add them all up? Should I do that now?

  But for a short beautiful while in that pool, I achieve flow. My mind is blank; time has lost its hold. I don’t mean this to sound more impressive than it is. For most people coming out of flow, a long time has passed in a snap; with me it feels like I’m waking from a long summery afternoon nap but in fact it’s only ninety seconds or so later. But those ninety seconds are enough to get me to nineteen laps, and the next thing I know I’m at twenty. Twenty! I can stop now and only have ten more after the break, but I know from the first ten how long ten can be so I eat into the final ten a little. My arms are heavy but I’m breathing okay.

  I make thirty and I know I can go on but a deep self-defeating part of me wants to stop. If I stop here I’ll have achieved less than I could, but next time I’ll be able to go even further.

  This is the kind of thing that works on me all the time; I can only assume oxygen-deprivation is affecting my usual decision-making process, and that’s why it doesn’t work this time. It takes mental energy to talk yourself out of doing as well as you can, and right now that seems like too much trouble so I just carry on swimming.

  I’m labouring now. My style has deteriorated. I’m like a bat who has fallen into a well. I’m so slow there’s a possibility I might start moving backwards, but the ten laps from thirty to forty are the easiest of them all.

  Finally at forty-three I stop.

  I towel myself down in a daze. I’m happy and bewildered. How did that just happen? I’ve just swum more than a kilometre without stopping. That’s not a gradual evolution of my swimming ability, it’s one of those mighty leaps forward that Stephen Jay Gould used to debate with Richard Dawkins in the days when Richard Dawkins spoke about science instead of picking fights with strangers on social media. An asteroid has hit the earth and an old order has died and a new race of mammal overlords has sprung forth. Before I was an ailing sea-mammal in a sack; now I’m a new race of mammal overlords! Nothing will be the same again!

  I walk back from the gym and meet Clarence for a drink at the Winchester. We’re supposed to be talking about our friendship.

  His wedding is drawing nearer and he wants me to be best man but given how things are going between me and his partner, he’s wondering if I even want to come to the wedding at all. Could I make more of an effort? But I don’t want to talk about his wedding or making an effort with his partner. All I want to talk about is how I’ve just swum a kilometre without stopping. I try to engage Clarence on this topic but he isn’t as interested in it as I am. I keep sniffing my arm. It smells of chlorine. Chlorine smells of victory! I offer Clarence my arm but he doesn’t want to smell it.

  We have a conversation that is evasive and sidelong and not entirely honest. It’s a disappointing conversation and I say of course I want to go to his wedding, and he says he’s glad about that, but something sad is happening: a friendship is slipping away without even a slammed door. A comet hasn’t crashed, it’s all just getting colder.

  But when I talk to my partner about my day I don’t talk about Clarence, I talk about my swim, and then I go back to the gym two days later and swim sixty laps without stopping.

  Then next time I swim seventy.

  9

  Water and Peace

  What do I learn during this time of training? Here’s something I learn: fifty metres is a lot longer than twenty-five. It’s much more than twice as long.

  The Sea Point pool is fifty metres long and open to the sky and the Atlantic. Waves break over the side in winter and seagulls bob on the water once it closes for the day. The water’s pumped in from the sea but it’s much warmer because it sits all day in a deep-blue dish in the sun. In the summer months lifeguards in yellow T-shirts and red floppy hats patrol the edges. They pretend they’re there to stop you drowning but really their job is to stop kids dive-bombing and to yell at hugging couples. Hugging is not allowed in the Sea Point pool. I approve of this. We are serious people here. I’ve never actually shopped anyone to the lifeguards for hugging, but I’ve seen some furtive handholding under the water, and if it doesn’t stop I’m not above an anonymous letter to the beaks.

  The first time I switch my training to the Sea Point pool I should be feeling cocky and self-confident because I’ve been swimming seventy and eighty lengths regularly at the gym. But I’m not, because last week I was idling through the internet, looking at swimming websites, and I came across lists of suggested drills for people training to swim the Dardanelles.

  Pyramid reps with bilateral breathing, stroke counting, 8 × 50 slow, then 4 × 50 faster, then arms only, then legs only with relaxed kick … What the hell’s all this? It’s like some olde-tyme alchemist’s recipe for turning lead into gold. What does it mean? Why would you do these things?

  Everything we do is mainly in the mind, even something as physical as staying alive in water. I was happy with my progress until I saw that website; now I’m rattled that everyone else is d
oing more than me, or doing something else. They’re doing something, damn it, and I don’t know what it is. I don’t even know who “everyone else” is, but they’re out there, doing splits and pyramid reps and using a relaxed kick and god knows what. I’m like the country mouse who has come to the city with his belongings in a knapsack on a stick over his shoulder, but it turns out that all the other mice are driving cars.

  Then I get a call from my friend Samantha. She’s in town and yesterday she swam from Robben Island to the shore. What? What?

  I meet her for coffee, and she sits down opposite me like a stranger. When last I saw her she was shaped more like me, but now she’s become all lean and long. She was a grown woman with domestic habits and an early-morning radio job and a family, then one day she turned forty and decided to see if she could swim a very long distance in a cold sea. I don’t know what her real reason for doing it is. I don’t ask because it’s an intrusive question and there are no easy answers and the answers you give when someone asks you over coffee aren’t the real reasons that get you up each morning to swim in the winter cold.

  I want to ask her about the swim itself, the day and everything that happened, but she shrugs it off. The swim didn’t matter so much, she says. That’s not the hard part, the part she’s proud of. She’s proud of the training.

  Sam does the breakfast show on Highveld Stereo, so she wakes up every day at 4.30 a.m. for work. She also has two kids – one seven and one ten. I don’t know much about kids of that age, but I suspect they take up time, especially if you’re one of those parents who let them attend school and take part in activities. For her training she had to swim between two and three hours a day, five kilometres a time, three days a week. She did it through the Joburg winter and spring and over Christmas and New Year. She did it for eight months without stopping.

  On the day of the swim when the water dropped below nine degrees and she became hypothermic and the current took her off-course and she had to swim through her own vomit, she carried on not because of her willpower and grit but because of all the hours of her training.

  “Did you do pyramid reps with bilateral breathing?” I ask, a little forlornly. “Do you know what relaxed kicks are?”

  She looks at me strangely.

  “Those things aren’t complicated,” she says. “Your trainer must be making you do them?”

  I look away, out to where the sun is shining hard on a sea like magnetised tourmaline.

  “You do have a trainer, right?”

  And that’s when I realise: I’m an amateur. I’m a genuine amateur, but not in the original sense of someone who does something for the love of it. I’m not even an amateur like Scott, who went to the South Pole without dog-sleds, or like those 1950s British mountain climbers who went up Everest in corduroys and stokies and came back sucking on briar pipes, saying, “Because it was there.” No, I’m an amateur like those dudes who wander into the Mojave Desert with no hat and just a rucksack of Coca-Colas and get lost and die in some arroyo. I’m a hazard to myself and to others. I’m an idler and a trifler and a bumbling lollygagger. But why am I surprised? That’s who I’ve always been. I’m just me, and me isn’t good enough.

  And so when I arrive at the sea pool mid-morning on a hot late-summer’s day, I’m not feeling cocky and self-confident. I’m feeling doubt and defeat.

  There’s only a few people in the water. There’s a stringy woman swimming fast lengths with a younger guy. They stop after each 100 metres and check their watches and grin at each other. Once she gives him a high five. That’s one consolation: at least I don’t have to swim with someone who makes me give them high fives.

  There’s another man on the side nearest the sea, swimming backstroke with long, slow, languid reaches, as though he’s reaching back in a darkened movie house to erotically stroke two men sitting behind him.

  All these people know what they’re doing.

  I’m looking for reasons not to swim. Maybe it’s going to rain. No, it’s not going to rain, there aren’t any clouds. Do I have sunblock? Have I left it behind? Oh, no, there it is. But I can’t reach my back. I don’t want to pick up sunstroke in the middle of my back, do I?

  When I run out of excuses I go in and swim. The water is cloudy with salt and spangled with tiny grits of light. I think about my elbow coming out of the water. I think about how deep my arm should go. I shouldn’t be thinking so much. I’d despondently asked Sam for tips and she’d said, “Keep your fingers together”, so I watch my hand. It’s true, I do leave little gaps, like the claw of a mechanical digger. How have I not noticed that before? What else haven’t I noticed? Is my mouth closed? Did I take my shoes off? Am I even wearing my Speedo?

  The water feels different. You’re supposed to be more buoyant in salty water but I sag like a young man’s trousers. It’s like I’m trying to swim up a river with a bear at the top of it. When the other swimmers pass me their wakes slop me from side to side like a log. I worry about the sun on the side of my face when I breathe on that side, so I start only breathing on the other side. I start trying to breathe less.

  It’s like walking up a beach that has turned subtly to porridge. When we’re tired, Nietzsche said, we’re assailed by ideas we defeated long ago. Why am I thinking about Nietzsche? Who quotes Nietzsche at a time like this? I have to remind myself to slow my thoughts and if I just keep going I’ll pass that invisible line where I stop thinking about it and it becomes better, but I can’t hold off the thinking and the thought comes: what if I feel like this when I’m in the middle of the channel and the bottom is fifty metres down and I can’t just stop and stand up? At least here I can stop and stand up. To prove it, I stop and stand up.

  I blink around me in the suddenly bright sun.

  I’ve swum seven lengths, and I’m defeated.

  People like Lewis Pugh say it feels bad to quit, but they tell a lie. Quitting never feels bad. It feels like a relief.

  10

  Hard Times

  Now let’s just get something straight – I don’t need Viagra. Okay? Let’s just clear that up right now. I don’t even want Viagra. But at a certain point, Viagra’s like Game of Thrones. You hear people talking, and you get curious.

  My friend Carl gave it a try. He’s forty-five, and he’d like me to mention that he also doesn’t need it. He definitely doesn’t need it. He just wanted to see what all the fuss is about. He came back with his eyes wide.

  “The thing is,” he said, “I didn’t need it …”

  “No, of course not.”

  “But you forget what it’s like.”

  “What what’s like?”

  “To have your eighteen-year-old penis back again.”

  He then, and I wish he hadn’t, proceeded to explain his point using the analogy of the frog in the pot of water. Your erection, in this analogy, is the frog. Allegedly, in the frog-in-a-pot story, if you slowly raise the temperature of the water, the frog will boil without even realising it until it’s just a mushy spoonful of amphibian, useless to you and to other frogs. In the same way, your erection has been gradually losing gusto, a little more every day, so very incrementally (or perhaps it’s decrementally) that you don’t even notice it. You might think you still warrant an 8 or 9 on the Mohs scale of hardness, making you a solid topaz or corundum, whereas in fact you are more like apatite or feldspar, a paltry 5 or 6. (Only a lunatic pretends to himself he’s still a diamond. We just have to hope we’re not gypsum or talc.)

  “It was magnificent!” Carl gasped. “I could have dug a hole with it. I could have chopped down a tree! I could have used it to scoop out ice cream, even when the ice cream has been in a freezer that’s too cold and it’s frozen solid!”

  “Sounds great,” I said. “I, uh, I wish I could have seen it.”

  “Not that I needed it.”

  “No, no.”

  “It’s just interesting. Like research.”

  “Sure, yes. Research.”

  Western men and women like to s
neer at the men of the East for their use of boner pills and potions, but so far as I can tell, the only difference between us and them is they don’t make up excuses about it.

  1. Sky fruit

  I was once in the botanical gardens on the island of Penang in the Straits of Malacca when a wrinkled old man with a face like a lacquered walnut offered to sell me sky fruit. I didn’t know what a sky fruit looks like in its natural state and I still don’t because it was in sachet form. What does it do, I asked. I needn’t have asked. There’s only one reason wizened old men offer you sachets of powdered fruit in tropical gardens. He made a hand gesture like a sky fruit plant coming into full and generous bloom and tipped me a horrible wink. I was indignant, so indignant I almost didn’t buy it and take it back to my hotel room and try it out.

  The procedure with sky fruit is you mix half a sachet in a glass of water. “Only half!” the old man had cautioned me, growing suddenly pale as he contemplated the consequences of a full sachet on a delicate occidental member. I almost, because I’m a fool, muttered to myself, “So he doesn’t think I’m man enough for the full sachet, does he?” and took the full measure, which just goes to show what a self-deluding sub-species of human we men are: we’re even capable of turning the unmacho act of erection enhancement into a blustering assertion of numbskull one-upmanship.

  Granulated sky fruit mixed with water is a fearful substance: fibrous and pulpy and somehow follicular, like a cat that has been passed through a colander. It tastes bitter and barklike and there’s only one reason you would carry on drinking it all the way to the bottom. I waited a while and watched some TV and forgot about it until I noticed a peculiar warmth in my cheeks. I consulted the mirror: there was a strange rosy flush about me, a bright blush as though I was an innocent chambermaid who’d wandered into the wrong room. And then the tingling started down below.