Quotes from Bonnie Tsui

Learning to swim meant learning how to relinquish control, to thrive in a space of uncertainty.

It hits me that this kind of thinking is in alignment with the traditional adaptiveness of the sea nomads: that we should teach ourselves how to live with water, not how to keep it at bay.

The water is the last place where people cannot text, call or find me," she says with a giggle.

It's an exercise in thresholds. How much I can take, how much distance I need, how far I can get from shore before I feel afraid, at what point I desire to return to land. I brew and brood over things that seem to be of consequence, but by the end of a swim, the water has washed much of that away.

It's a reminder to slow up and be awake to the real connections we have while we have them.

to be ignorant of "either letters or swimming," Plato declared, was to lack a proper education.

swimming as the act of moving in the embrace of water,

Differences fell away in the water.

As I learn more about the Baghdad swimmers, I start noticing how the water is a privileged space and what an invitation to that space can mean for all kinds of tribes.

Hospital patients recovering from heart surgery have been found to need less pain medication when there are nature scenes at the foot of their beds; an image that includes water is even more effective than an image of an enclosed forest in reducing anxiety during the post-operative period.

When we dive underwater, the spleen contracts as part of the mammalian diving reflex, shooting its supply of oxygenated red blood cells into circulation around the body. The heart rate slows, and blood vessels constrict, directing blood flow away from the extremities and toward major organs. These energy conservation measures kick in so we can use available oxygen more efficiently.

Some of the swimmers, like the security guards from Peru or Nepal, they were so poor—they lived a hard life and sent all of their money home," Jay says. "The fact that someone would give them a cap or a two-dollar pair of goggles meant a lot." He paid for the gear out of his own pocket. The

I salt my wounds, I chlorine my eyes; I am a self-destructive fool." There's caution here. And yet we dance near that line anyway, because there's something to see.

Swimming has always been a means of escape: physical, spiritual, mental. And if that's true, then what better place is there for a swim team than a war zone?

Some people unpack when they first arrive in a city. Me, I look for Chinatown.

Renew thyself completely each day; do it again, & again, & forever again.

Many of us have joined a swim team at one time or another, and there is a shared foundational experience here that's worth examining. Battle past the desperate life-or-death phase of swimming, and you begin to appreciate how good the water feels. Join a team, and you begin to appreciate the company you keep. Competition happens when you get good enough at swimming to want to be better.

Swimming's benefit, he argues, has as much to do with intellectual enhancements as it does the achievements of the body. The ideal modern swimmer focuses on the whole experience rather than the perception of exercise as a "tune-up." Important, too, is the pride we feel in the well-exercised body. "The fuller sense of self we have," Young once told an interviewer, "the more responsibility we take for it.