The World Below The Surface
Finding a portal to another world in a swimming pool, and what it reveals about being alive.
ALIVENESS: a philosophy and practice for living fully in the awareness of a finite life.
We’ve had the good fortune these last few months travelling the world as a family to have access to pools.
Now, every time I jump into the water, I do the same thing.
I sink to the bottom. Roll onto my back. And stay there for as long as I can hold my breath. It’s my new favourite mini-meditation.
Above me, the surface undulates. Light bends through the shifting membrane, where air meets water, in long, shifting prisms. Rainbow edges catching and dissolving, catching and dissolving. The whole ceiling of the water is alive. Psychedelic. Like looking up at the sky through someone else’s dream.
From my mouth and nose, bubbles pop and rise. Slowly at first, then faster as I exhale.
I’ve learned I can control the movement of the bubbles, a long slow breath produces a single column of silver, rising in a perfect line. A short puff sends a cluster scattering upward, each one finding its own path to the surface.
I watch them go.
My boy suddenly swims over me, looking down with goggles, grinning, mischievous. He then gives me an underwater kiss before gliding away without sound.
Down here, the noise of the world above are muffled. Children’s voices. Music. Someone laughing. All of it softened to a baseline hum, like the world is happening somewhere far away and I am briefly, blissfully, elsewhere.
I don’t know exactly when I started doing this. A few weeks ago. But I know why I keep doing it.
It feels extremely comfortable. Like a womb.
Not metaphorically. Actually. The weightlessness, the warmth, the contained silence, the sense of being held by something larger than yourself.
I wrote once about a ceremony in which I was taken back to the memory of being in my mother’s womb - the orange glow, the heartbeat, the feeling that everything was safe and nothing could reach me there. The pool gives me a version of that. Voluntarily. Whenever I need it.
I am forty-six years old and right now, with this swimming pool, I return to the womb every day.
I am writing this newsletter from Phu Quoc, a Vietnamese island where we have spent the last few weeks at a ‘world school’ - a pop up, temporary community/school where travelling families come together and engage in educational activities.
At world schools the children find each other across languages and nationalities, whilst the adults recognise a similar sense of adventure in each other’s faces. We all made the same unusual choice to travel for months, sometimes years. We all said yes to something most people only talk about.
Last July, my wife Linnea and I sold our house, packed one carry-on bag each, took our children out of school, and left.
Some days that still doesn’t feel real.
There are moments on this trip, when I have felt something close to awe. A perfect sunset. A picnic meal in nature, or sitting around a fire on Lake Atitlán, singing ancient medicine songs with people we met three days ago and will probably never see again.
The particular dizziness of realising you are actually inside your life, not watching it from a safe distance.
The pool gives me that too.
When I am lying at the bottom, looking up at the rippling surface above me, I think: this is what it feels like to be on the other side. Up there is the world I usually inhabit, the decisions, the plans, the notifications, the calendar, the version of life that happens on screens. Down here is something older. Quieter. More true.
Most of us spend almost all of our time above the surface. Reacting. Managing. Moving through the day at the speed the day demands. It is not a bad life. In many ways it is a full one. But it is not the same as being fully inside it.
There is a difference between living your life and inhabiting it, and most of us only discover that difference in the moments we least expect. A piece of music that stops us mid-step. A child saying something that cracks us up. Thirty seconds at the bottom of a pool on a Vietnamese island, watching bubbles rise toward the light.
Aliveness is not always found in the extraordinary.
It is found in the ordinary. The mundane. Every where.
This week, I’d like to invite you to find your version of the pool.
Not literally, though if you have access to water, I genuinely recommend it. But the question underneath the question is this: where in your life do you drop below the surface? Where do you go when the world above gets too loud? And if the honest answer is nowhere… that might be worth sitting with.
You don’t need a Vietnamese island to find it. You just need thirty seconds and the willingness to go under.
Live happy,
Hoppy
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The line about realizing you are "inside your life, not watching it from a safe distance" stayed with me.
There is a subtle but important distinction here between living and inhabiting. The essay reminded me that aliveness is often found not in extraordinary moments, but in paying fuller attention to ordinary ones....
We all originally evolved from water.