Tales From the Pool

Steady:  Constant, regular, uniform, or continuous; not changing, wavering, faltering, etc.


How about a positive swimming message?  This is theoretical, more or less, and doesn't involve any actual physical pools with actual physical people who make me SO MAD hanging around to complicate things.


Anyway, when I finally got sober I was often frustrated by the slow pace of my recovery.  I wanted to get to a better place in a hell of a big hurry.  I realize today that I was trying to make something time-consuming consume no time.  The unfortunate drawback to this technique is that a certain amount of time was needed to work through things that needed to be worked through.  I thought the good times would be awarded to me as if I had put a quarter in a vending machine and pushed A22, the selection for Twinkies.  And unless this machine was transported to my vending machine area from about 1973 I wasn't going to get any Twinkies, which cost a lot more than a quarter, even though I was being overcharged at that price.


Did you know the company that makes Twinkies is going out of business?  It's too late to rush out and buy some, too; you should have thought about supporting this iconic American brand long ago.  Did you know that a food science professor at some university tacked a package of Twinkies above his blackboard 30 years ago, and the the Twinkies look pretty much the same, except for some discoloration from sunlight?  True story.


I clearly remember that when I began swimming I spent a lot of time my laboring painfully down the lane, struggling for breath, my strokes uneven and uncoordinated.  Today I'm a fairly smooth swimmer; I don't swim too fast or too long, but I'm smooth and steady.  On occasion someone who is a swimming newcomer will remark on my speed or my stamina, the fools, and I find myself simply saying: "I've been swimming for 4 years."  The implication is that I'm not swimming well because I'm an athlete of any renown, just a guy who has been at it for a while.


It's that way with my alcoholism.  I've been doing it for a while.  It's a process, not an event.  I'm pretty sure that I'll get through everything that I need to get through -- which is everything that there is -- if I simply keep at it.  I have a few bad days and a lot of ordinary days but I keep stroking forward.  


Choking down an occasional mouthful of pool water, sure, but never drowning.