Photo by Clark Young on Unsplash

Here’s a confession: I don’t know how to swim.

(Audible gasp from the crowd)

It’s true. In land-locked Derwent, Alberta, where I grew up, there was no community swimming pool – and the closest one in the ’70s was probably in Vermilion – where I currently live and where my own children were thrown to the Sharks. (Relax! it was a level in the Red Cross swimming program.) There was no one driving me to swimming lessons a half an hour away when I was a kid. Sure, I guess I could have been thrown into the slough but I think my family was all a bunch of landlubbers and couldn’t have taught me, either. We didn’t hang out at the lake – unless it was frozen and we could skate on it.

Among the many athletic pursuits that I attempted (and quit) during my stint at the U of A was The Time That I Signed Up For Swimming Lessons. I was in a learning environment, I had a full-course load, ergo I thought to myself, “Self, let’s learn how to swim for no apparent reason.” Well, maybe the reason was because I really wanted to go on the cannonball waterslide at West Edmonton Mall without feeling like I was drowning when I got pitched into the 12-foot-deep pool at the end of the rapid-ejection-tube. Also, there was that time I went canoeing with friends at Sunset Lake and, for shits and giggles, my bestie (you know who you are!) decided it would be fun to tip the canoe and dunk us all. OF COURSE, WE WERE WEARING LIFEJACKETS. Henceforth, I developed a deep and abiding love for floatation devices – they are magic to me.

Fast forward to 1986 when I signed up for BEGINNER swimming lessons at the giant pool at the U of A. (In my memory, it was about an acre squared (farm-girl measurements) and easily that deep as well. The first question that the instructor asked our group of (supposed) non-swimmers was: “Who here has some swimming experience?” Nine people raised their hands. One (that would be me) didn’t. This meant that I was left at the shallow end of the pool to learn how to float with the instructor’s angry assistant (I’m pretty sure he was the same angry T.A. from my Organic Chemistry lab) while the rest of the happy crowd went to the deep end and started doing back flips off the high diving board.

I tried. I floated. I came back the next week and floated again. And then I stopped going to the lessons – I just flushed that money down the drain of the U of A swimming pool. Because I wasn’t learning anything.

I suppose I could boo-hoo about this situation, and to be frank, I did for a long time. And then, years later, a lifeguard friend told me about teaching “an old guy” (he was in this 40s – which is ancient in learning-to-swim terms) to swim. This Old Guy was going on a cruise, the trip-of-a-lifetime and he knew that he wanted to swim in the pool on the ship. That’s it – not for the ocean – just for the lido deck on The Love Boat. But then my lifeguard friend said something revolutionary, that the lessons weren’t the most important part, it was the practicing time. And this guy wanted to swim so badly, that he went to the pool everyday – and practiced.

As Despicable Me‘s Gru would say: Lightbulb!

This lesson has stuck with me ever since: if I see a flashy new class for something I think I want to learn, I need to figure out if I also have the time to practice the new skill. This is the reason most people head to post-secondary education immediately after high school: they have the time to devote to it – well, hypothetically anyways – without any pesky spouses or kids or mortgages or full-time jobs to get in the way. That time spent studying? It’s practice time. And practice time, for something you really want to learn, is time well spent. Or even, well-wasted, as the saying has morphed.

I suppose that the reason I didn’t write a lot before the last couple of years was because I didn’t have enough time to devote to practice time. Granted, a person can always find time for something they REALLY want to do. Julia Cameron of The Artist’s Way says that if it’s a love affair we’re talking about, you always find the time to sneak away for a tryst. Why not translate that into other long-lost or new-found “loves”: writing, disk-golfing, learning Italian (the language or the cuisine), mining bitcoin, whatever. But decide not just to learn, also to practice. Because signing up isn’t the same as signing on.

I probably won’t be learning to swim anytime soon. But dang it, I’m sure going to practice my writing. Because that’s where I want to waste my time.