I have a new love in my life: swimming. And I’ve learned three things while swimming that I want to share.

Some background: I can hold my own in the water, but I’ve never been a regular swimmer—or even, frankly, a regular exerciser.

I have friends who ache to be moving. They can’t wait to get to the gym, or get outside and move their body. That’s not me. But in the past, during the stretches of time when I would get myself exercising, my cardiovascular exercise of choice was always slow jogging. But… I’m about to turn 50, and my knees won’t tolerate jogging anymore. So then I tried incline hiking on the treadmill, and in short order, that bothered my knees. Biking, too. 

Finally, I tried swimming, and the minute I got into the water and swam a few laps I thought: I love this. It felt amazing. 

So the first lesson is this: sometimes, when it feels like something is happening to us beyond our control, it is all in service of a good end. All my challenges with my knees, which were so frustrating, resulted in me finally getting into a pool. 

There’s a wonderful saying: think not about how this is happening to you, but for you. 

And there’s a sweet story with this same moral in the Baha’i writings. A man was tortured with missing his beloved. She was gone, and he couldn’t find her. One day, he went out to the marketplace to distract himself. Suddenly, a Watchman started following him. Then another. The Watchmen chased him until he came upon a big brick wall. In a panic, he scaled the brick wall, cutting his hands and arms. He tumbled over the wall and fell down into a meadow… where he found himself at the feet of his beloved. She was looking for a ring she had lost in the grass. The man dropped to his knees and cried out, “God, give thanks to the Watchmen, and long life, and love! I thought they were persecuting me, but actually they were my Angel Gabriel, leading me to my beloved.”

That’s how I felt about swimming. I was feeling persecuted by knee pain, and that’s the only reason I tried it—and it turned out to be a huge blessing.

Here’s the second lesson: I didn’t know if my shoulders would tolerate swimming, so the first day I swam eight minutes, and that was enough. The next day, I did the same—all week, three times. The next week I did nine minutes. The next: ten. I increased by just one minute a week. For months. 

I couldn’t have done this years ago. I like to go from zero to 60 right away. Moderation is not in my vocabulary. But from weighing and measuring my food, I’ve learned to weigh and measure my life, and, in this case, my exercise. Slow and steady wins the race. It’s amazing how productive we can be when we weigh and measure our output. 

Here’s the third lesson: this week in the pool I had an experience that was torture. Last week, I had become aware that 30 minutes wasn’t seeming like enough. So, this week, while in the middle of my swim, I started thinking about it: what if I swam more? Maybe 35 minutes? How about 40? And then I thought, why not go all the way to 45 minutes? I tried to do the math in my head for timing all the various options: what time would my swim end? I thought about how my shoulders were feeling, what my day would look like if I swam more… and on and on. It became an obsession. I couldn’t stop thinking about it. It was the way I used to obsess over food.

I finally got out of the pool at 30 minutes, just to shut my head up. It was my first bad swim. I wasn’t comfortable in my head because of the “Will I? Won’t I? Should I? Shouldn’t I?” thoughts.

I committed to my husband that I would swim 35 minutes the next time I was in the pool and not second-guess myself, and still I was surprised at how hard it was not to get caught up in the whirlwind of internal thoughts and questions. 

The lesson? Thinking, “Will I? Won’t I? Should I? Shouldn’t I?” is sheer torture, in swimming, with food, with anything. This is why we write down our food in BLE the night before. Not after we’ve eaten it, but BEFORE. It is a mercy and a blessing to take that action. And yes, it takes more than one day to train ourselves to eat only that without second guessing it mentally, but when we stay persistent, that practice silences the internal chatter. The mental peace we get with Bright Line Eating is the number one gift of the program. 

Those are my three lessons on swimming. I don’t know how I became this person, but suddenly I find myself feeling motivated to do whatever it takes to get in my three weekly swims. It’s taken me years to be someone who can exercise consistently. So that’s a fourth Bonus Lesson: sometimes big gifts come even decades after starting this way of living. Stick with it. It’s worth it.