When friends said they were traveling out of town and needed someone to come by and "check on their pool" occasionally, I was quick to volunteer. I love being in the water. I love to swim. I have my best ideas in water. The reason may be that's when I'm most relaxed — whether I'm with friends or on my own.
Having had more time in the past few weeks to be in a pool with only my husband nearby, I've reflected on why it's so good for my brain and being. I've developed a theory — and it connects to why I like watching K-dramas so much. Since April 2020, I've watched Korean dramas almost every night.
(Sidenote: If you haven't watched K-dramas and are looking for a pleasant diversion, I highly recommend watching the beautiful, easygoing rom-com ones. Netflix and Prime have loads of options. The one to start with is "Crash Landing on You." Yes, the first episode is completely ridiculous, but trust me, the storyline climbs and you'll grow to care more about a South Korean heiress trapped in North Korea after a paragliding accident than you ever thought possible.)
But I digress.
Back to the topic at hand.
Floating in a pool and watching K-dramas may not seem to have anything in common, but they do. The connective thread is that when I'm watching a K-drama, I can't do anything else. Following along takes all of my attention.
Watching K-dramas has made me realize how much disdain I have for multitasking. The beautiful thing about being in a swimming pool is that it allows me to do even less. I can't be on the phone. I don't even know if someone is trying to message me.
All I can do is be exactly where I am. If friends are with me, we can be in the water together. If only my husband and I are there, he generally fishes nearby and I get to float or swim laps. I float more than I lap. Sometimes, while I'm floating, I give serious consideration to the way the ripples distort the drain at the bottom of the pool. Sometimes, I stare into the clouds. Sometimes, I close my eyes while hanging nearly weightless on an inflatable, practically gravity-less.
This quiet and stillness has been a luxury difficult to describe. I've always liked being in the water, but what it's done for me this summer has been next level. I have spent decades traveling and experiencing as many places as I could find a way to see. Something shifted recently. Recently, I canceled a trip that would have taken me to my 50th country — a landmark I would like to reach eventually, but going has become less important.
I'm unpacking the reasons why.
Pico Iyer's book, "The Art of Stillness," has helped me be more thoughtful about this newfound personal realization. Iyer's book is about "the unexpected adventure of staying put." He works to reveal "a counterintuitive truth: The more ways we have to connect, the more we seem desperate to unplug."
Iyer wrote that the idea of going nowhere is "as universal as the law of gravity; that's why wise souls from every tradition have spoken of it. 'All the unhappiness of men,' the seventeenth-century French mathematician and philosopher Blaise Pascal famously noted, 'arises from one simple fact: that they cannot sit quietly in their chamber.'"
When I told my 22-year-old daughter, Piper, about how much I was enjoying being still this summer, she explained that her generation has a name for doing just that.
"Sometimes we all need to stay in bed and not go anywhere or do anything," she said to me this week. "We call it 'bed rot,' Mom."
I need to let her know that her generation didn't corner the market on the idea of bed rot.
Pascal described it about 400 years ago.
As the world seems to speed up, life twirls, twists and spirals in so many directions. I believe this is why some of us, myself included, enjoyed the pandemic lockdown.
Much has been written and said about the compulsion society has with the inflated value of busy-ness. Being still, even for an afternoon, whether at home in bed or in a friend's pool, is a tiny reset.
Resist the hollow allure of busy.
Find your equivalent of K-dramas, or better yet — floating in a pool.
Embrace doing nothing on occasion. It's good for your brain.
Iyer writes that in Kyoto, Japan, they have a saying, "Don't do something. Sit there."