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“Swimming is an antidote for the existential anxiety from which I suffer.” – Bonnie Tsui, Why We Swim

I’m lying on my back in a heated pool in the dark. My arms and legs move in a lazy frog-like pattern, just enough to keep moving, not enough to take much energy. I’ve been doing freestyle back and forth, and since I’m still really in the learning phase of swimming, I use this elementary backstroke to recover my breath once I’ve done something wrong and run out of air. 

I’ve watched night fall, and the fog above has gone from white to a dark ash. I know that once I pass under the limb of the oak that’s shaped like a ghostly hand, I’m about two feet from the pool’s edge. On the other side, I use my peripheral vision to watch for the second-to-last rail of the fence. Then I give up the backstroke altogether and raise my arms over my head, my fingers waiting to touch the concrete. I remain still, floating, inertia the only thing moving me and that only barely. My lungs lift my ribcage out of the water and then I sink back down as every outbreath makes me less buoyant. 

When my fingertips brush the wall of the pool, I lazily fold myself in half as I exhale. My legs and arms go up, my rear goes down, and I’m under the surface, looking at my own body’s reflection against the top of the water. I take a moment to sink (as much as my already-buoyant body will let me), looking through the pool’s wavering lights. 

Then I do five or six more freestyle laps. I can’t think much about anything, because I’m too busy thinking about the way my body is moving. Oh, that was a good stroke. Yes, that’s how you lift your chin to get maximum air on the right side breath. Damn it, what happened on the left? Was it the position of my arm? What the hell are my legs doing? Quit kicking so hard. Bend your knees less. Glide. 

Every once in a while, I get it exactly right, and I glide while my whole body is relaxed, resting face-down in the top foot or so of water. The very act of holding your breath slows your heart rate, so yes, I’m exercising, but it doesn’t feel like I am. I’m just playing. 

This particular form of play is what I’ve missed most during this shelter-in-place. Yes, I swam last weekend in 53-degree water in the Bay, but that felt more like survival. I fell in love with being in a pool in May of last year. I got a good six months of practice before winter set in and I was too much of a baby to continue swimming, something I deeply regret. I would have been in the Mills pool all winter if I’d known by March I wouldn’t have the chance. 

But now my swim teacher has rented a residential pool in Alameda, and while her lessons feel prohibitively expensive for a person who’s spending a college education on making her old dog Clementine comfortable in her dotage, I can afford my teacher’s “unassisted” lap swim. I take half the pool while she teaches one person in the other side of the pool. 

That means I now, as of last night, get to go through the looking glass once a week. I get to lie under the water and look up. 

As a kid, my favorite, most peaceful moments were sitting on the bottom of the pool, the deep thrum of the water in my ears as everything I looked at appeared different and magical, compared to the way things looked on the surface. I can capture a little of that feeling during meditation, when I release a breath and resist the first urge to take another one. If I wait just a beat, the urge to breathe goes away and I can rest on the bottom of my mind. Of course, just a few seconds later, the urge becomes an actual need and I’m happy to take the next breath. I’m not holding my breath. I’m just waiting for the next one to arise. 

In Why We Swim, Tsui says, “Push through the looking-glass, and you’ll discover a different way of being. This heightened attentiveness—the ballooning of time, or the speeding-up of it; the perception that time no longer matters, or that it matters less than you might have thought—is the kind of flow I’m after. As human swimmers, we can really be the fish. You and I, we know that. We don’t have to remind ourselves that it’s water around us. But we get glimpses of what it’s like to be the fish. We get flashes of forgetting the water. In the forgetting, we can drift.” 

She’s right. Inside that drift is where the flow happens. 

I find it at my desk when I forget that I have a body and that the words on the page aren’t real, when I slip into the book I’m writing and inhabit it so fully that I forget everything else. 

Of course, this drift—this flow—is only realized after you’ve come to. Like a dream, you wake and you remember again where you are. 

Last night, I could have sworn I only swam about twenty minutes before getting tired and leaving, but when I looked at my phone, it had been almost an hour. Normally, I’m preternaturally conscious of time. I wake a minute before my alarm, no matter what time I set it for. If I start a cooking timer, I hear an almost-audible ping in my mind and get up and walk toward the kitchen just before it goes off forty-five minutes later, even though I haven’t been thinking about it at all. My wife thinks it’s a special kind of superpower. Yes, my body and mind understand time, but not when I’m swimming. Not when I’m writing. 

And in this forgetting, the flow of drift is what I chase. 

I have been looking for this beach for most of my adult life. 

One of my most vivid memories as a child is being on the sand in a small sheltered cove. My dad was far out in the water in his styrofoam sailboat. I loved that boat, loved the way I could pick small pieces off with my fingers. (I know! But those little chunks of styrofoam were like bubble wrap to other people. I just couldn’t help myself.)

On this day on the beach—I only remember being there once—my sisters and my mother were on the sand. Mom had a thermos lid of coffee in one hand and the baby cradled in the other. Christy and I had digging tools and a desire to make the best sandcastle ever made, but so far all we had was a lump of wet sand and a brewing argument. 

Something happened with Dad’s boat as he tried to sail back into the cove. I don’t think what happened was related to any hole that I might have helped along with my seven-year-old fingers—at least I hope not. I imagine that the wind gusted from a surprising direction, or maybe a rogue wave hit him unawares.

His boat capsized.

I don’t remember hearing him yell, and I don’t remember my mother being visibly scared (even though she was terrified of being on the ocean in a boat). All I remember is a group of handsome young men rushing into the water and swimming out to him. Together they towed him and the boat in safely.

Even though something ostensibly scary had happened, I just remember it as exciting and fun. We didn’t often spend an afternoon playing on the sand, so in my mind, it’s a good memory, not a bad one. 

I’ve been living in the Bay Area for almost 25 years as an adult, looking for this beach. The beach was particular. Like I said, it was small, and I knew there was a view of a big island with just the top of the Golden Gate Bridge visible behind it. But I’d never been able to find it. 

It wasn’t until I read Bonnie Tsui’s book Why We Swim and interviewed her for my podcast, How Do You Write, that I learned about Keller Beach. We talked about open water swimming, which is something I’ve been doing during the pandemic. I thought I had googled every good place to swim nearby, but she mentioned Keller as her favorite place to swim.

Yesterday, I met my friend to swim there (safely socially distanced, of course). And it was the beach that had featured so strongly in my memory, the beach that walks into my dreams with often! Accessed from side roads that run off side roads, the only way you would know it was there was if a local told you. And, as it happened, it was just 10 minutes from where we lived as a kid.

Yesterday, the water was incredibly cold, the coldest water I’ve been in so far. Okay, it was 53 degrees, so it wasn’t glacier-cold, but still, even with a wetsuit, it was breathtakingly frigid. I forgot my goggles on the beach and I tried to swim anyway, keeping my eyes closed, but it turns out I’m very bad at that. Every time I put my head into the water, I got a persistent and very painful brain freeze—I thought I’d felt that from ice cream before, but it was no match for bay water. 

So instead of swimming hard, head down, my friend and I just bobbed and paddled and chatted, which was exactly what I needed. I didn’t feel seal-like and coordinated, the way I did the last time I swam at Aquatic Park in San Francisco, but it was more important just to be with a friend and connect. 

And from out there, looking in, I realized I’m now twelve years older than my father was when he capsized. The brawny young men who rushed into the water must have been just kids, teenagers. No matter what, it was a short swim to land, so the excitement and shouting and splashing must have been purely about saving the boat, not saving a person. (Which they did—the boat survived to be picked at some more though I don’t remember going out to watch him sail again.) 

My body was in the same place, forty-one years later. I walked on the same beach, a beach I’d almost given up looking for. I swam in the same water my father did. 

I’m not a person who looks back often. I don’t live in the past. I try to enjoy my memories, but I usually forget to remember them. But the rush of the memory of that day was as welcome as the heated seat in my car afterward. 

And I’m left wondering—what do our bodies leave behind? My whole self reacted as I walked onto the sand—a recognition. 

Will I feel that in New Zealand? Is there an ancestral piece of my soul that will open when we get there?

We’re planning on trying to find a place in Wellington, where my mother lived when she worked for the prime minister as a speechwriter. I have deliciously woo-woo thoughts about the fact that since women are born with all the ova they’ll ever have, I was there with her, in—well, not in utero, but in pre-utero (sometimes I get tangled up in my mind thinking about this maternal link. How far back does that connection go? If my mother’s gamete was inside my grandmother, and I was in my mother, was I also somehow inside my grandmother as she helped run the sheep farm in Methven? She was the biggest knitter I’ve ever known—the knitting gene skipped Mom and went straight to me. Was Grandma scared of the water? Is that where my mother got it from? Is the way I pine to be in water just a genetic twist on obsession?).

Yesterday, I found a memory, one I’d actively looked for for years. 

My goal is to make more of them, lots more, but with no capsized boats or daring rescues. I made one yesterday, kicking lazily through the icy water with Mia.

We may have gone into ultra-lockdown again today, but I’m so grateful I have this new memory. I’ll remember laughing with Mia in the same body of water that we floated my mother’s ashes in years ago, the same body of water that connects to New Zealand just on the other side of the Golden Gate. 

Listen here:

So, what’s You’re Already Ready about? Well, it’s a book that’s being written, so that’s Thing One. That book is non-fiction, and it’s about how you – yes, you! – are already ready to do what you want most to do, whether that’s to start a new business, to learn to scuba dive, to write a novel, or to teach ballroom dancing.

Here’s the truth: you’re never going to feel confident enough to start. Ever.

You’re never going to feel like you’re ready to make the leap, no matter what you want to leap into.

And once you start? You’re never going to feel like you’re good enough to keep going.

Asking people to tell you that you’re ready? It’s going to feel good for the moment, and then you’ll go right back to not believing what they say or forgetting that you believed it for a moment.

So I’m not going to waste your time by encouraging you to believe you’re ready.

Instead, I’m going to remind you, over and over again, of one thing:

You don’t need to feel like you’re ready.

(The actual truth is that you already are. But you’ll never feel that way, so you can’t waste time worrying about it.)

You just do the thing. One tiny step at a time, you inch your way toward being the person you want to be.

Those tiny steps add up. If you live in New York and you walk a mile every day toward California, you’ll eventually end up there, even if it takes you almost seven years. (That’s one of the tricks, you know. Take the smallest steps you possibly can. Eventually, you crest a hill that you were scared of, and you start moving faster on the next downhill, even though you never meant to. But don’t worry about that now. A single step is all it takes at first.)

So, the book You’re Already Ready is about punching resistance right in the snoot. It’s about showing up and doing the work, even when you don’t think you can. Okay, especially when you don’t think you can.

But that’s not what the podcast is about, or at least, not entirely. There will be some of that good stuff as I work on the book. I’m going to be exploring what this all means for myself, and I’ll share it with you.

Even more, though, the podcast is an audio-diary – kind of a blog for the ears.

See, I’ve MISSED my blog. I started it eighteen years ago when I could only dream of being a full-time writer. In a very large part, it’s WHY I’m a full-time writer now. Putting my words out into the world was how I found out that I wouldn’t die if I did. That was way back in 2002, two years before blogs became mainstream, and yes, I do mention that as a point of pride.

My middle sister, Christy, told me about this thing called a Web Log, aka a blog. I told her I couldn’t imagine who’d want to read the thoughts of strangers online (she’s the same sister who told me about Nanowrimo, four years later — I’m very grateful to her and that she doesn’t mind when I tell her something is a bad idea that turns out to be the best idea ever. She was right about the Spice Girls, too.)

I just wrote about my life on the blog, and it turned out that yes, people did want to sit in my virtual armchair and chat with me about my stories (more than a million people a year, in Yarnagogo.com’s heyday). I made so many friends through ye olde blogge (maybe you?), and a ton of those friends and I are still connected.

This was still seven years before Facebook would catch on, when everyone got their own little platform from which to tell stories and secrets and conspiracy theories. Me, right around then, I defected to Twitter. That’s where I told my stories and tried to make people laugh or, just in general, tried to connect, always the thing that’s one of my highest priorities.

But sometimes it makes me sad, actually, that I’ve written almost 80,000 tweets on a platform I don’t own, and can’t easily scroll back through.

And eventually, all the attention I put into my blog waned, and then stopped altogether.

Since my first book was published in 2010, I’ve felt too busy making words for a living, and I let go of writing here as a creative outlet.

I really miss it.

I go back to posts every so often, just to read what life was like back then. I love reading about when Digit came home after walking to me for four months. I like to read about getting engaged to my wife, and about our wedding, and our second wedding, and our third wedding. I like to read about when she went on tour with her band in Europe. I like to read about when I fell in love with Clara, the first dog of my own. And when I got to quit the day job!

I’ve done almost no blogging since I quit, since 2016, when I became a full-time writer. A lot of that has to do with the fact that I’ve been really preoccupied with making sure I bring in a living that can keep our roof over our heads.

But I want to capture those moments, big and small, that make up my life. That show motion, and intent, and dreams. For the first six years of my blog, I wanted to write books but couldn’t. Then I did (love you forever, Nanowrimo). I kept doing it, and now I’m here, at another big crossroads in life.

We’re moving to New Zealand!

This is arguably a bigger move than changing careers, and it’s absolutely terrifying. We don’t know if we’re making the right decision.

But this is true:

We will never feel confident that this is the right choice.

We will never feel ready.

And this is also true: We’re already ready.

Except, of course, we are by no means ready in practical terms. I want to chronicle this journey here, reviving the blog and making the blog into an audio-diary of sorts, which you can follow on any of your favorite podcatchers.

And as I go, I really want to hear from you:

What are you going to do next? What are you not ready to do? What aren’t you certain about? What do you lack confidence in?

Take a step toward it. Tell me about it? (Subscribe here to be kept apprised of The Big Stuff! I read and respond to all of my emails, even though it might take me a little while.)

I’m so glad you’re here. Let’s leap into something new, together.

Lala and I are starting to get a little bit more freaked out about this planned move to New Zealand.

Last night we sat at the dinner table and looked at each other with very big eyes.

“I’m just nervous,” she said.

“Me too.” I’m nervous about so many things, number one being that we’ll regret going so far away from our loved ones. “What are you nervous about?”

She said, “That I’m going to be cold.”

This is something we’ve been mildly squabbling about for months. Legend has it that Kiwis don’t know and don’t care what insulation is in houses. This actually explains SO MUCH about the house where I lived during high school and undergrad, the house where my dad still lives. It has no heat except for the fireplace in the living room. Yes, it’s California. And yes, it still freezes in the winter. My mom never tripped on it, and therefore, we really didn’t, either. We just bundled up and spent a lot of time reading under the covers.

Lala and I recently watched a home improvement show set in New Zealand called Creative Living, and the house they restored had no insulation at all. As in, they ripped out the drywall, and the beams behind it were naked and shivering.

Me, I like a bit of a draft. I like it when my feet are cold. When I sleep, I like the room to be as cold as humanly possible, and I still keep the fan directed right at me, year-round.

I’m also of the belief that being cold is empirically better than being hot. After all, you can always put on a sweater. You can always do some jumping jacks to move the blood if you’ve been sitting a while. You can always put on some wool socks that your wife made you out of your collection of many wool socks that your wife has made you.

So I can admit that I haven’t been as receptive to Lala’s worry as I could have been. It’s a human thing to do, to assume that everyone else feels approximately the same way that you do. If they don’t, there must be something wrong with them, because it certainly couldn’t be you. Very honestly, this is something I’ve been working on a lot in the last few years. Humans are selfish beings, and I don’t begrudge them that. We’re all trying to avoid suffering and achieve equanimity, if not outright happiness.

But when you finally realize that your wife hasn’t just been grumbling but is actually frightened — when you realize that, it’s time to make a change. When she was a kid, her mom used to find her sleeping on top of the heat vent. She needs heat just the same I need coolth (which is so a word).

So for the last three days, I’ve been practicing. I’ve been heating the house way past what I’m comfortable with. I spend most of my waking hours in my office, and if I close my door and cover the heating vent with a collection of blankets and pillows, I can keep my office cool as the side of a refrigerator while the rest of the house shimmers like a desert road in the sun.

Lala, when she realized the house was finally warm enough for her, admitted she thought I might be being passive-aggressive. I will point out I am not above being this on a bad day. But in this case, I wasn’t. I really want to reassure her.

So last night as we talked again about her fear of being cold, I said, very seriously, “We will not let that happen. If we have to buy three space heaters and sit you in the middle of them for the whole of winter, we’ll do that. Haven’t you noticed how I’ve been keeping you warm lately?”

She exclaimed, “You’ve been doing that for one day!”

“Two days,” I corrected her.

She grimaced.

Today makes three days.

Here’s the thing, we both want to go to New Zealand. We both think it’s a good idea. So many people want to go, but we’re actually able to.

And the fears we are feeling are big and real, and what I have to remember is every time I downplay one of her fears, I’m not listening to the person I choose to spend my life with, not listening to the person I’m in love with. And that’s not okay.

So!

I now plunge into a new winter in Oakland, where I will wear a tank top and shorts inside the main part of the house in order to reassure Lala that she never has to be cold again.

We won’t rent a house in New Zealand until we get them to demonstrate the heat pump to us, whatever a heat pump is. We’ve googled, and we still have no clue. It certainly sounds colder than the forced heat we have. A heat pump sounds like the suggestion of heat. Our forced heat is just that — a wild surge of hot air that has similarities to what I’m full of sometimes.

In the meantime, I’ll just keep the desk fan pointed right at me. As usual.

Hello!

I just did a podcast (How Do You Write #167) on recent podcasts that have lit me up, inside and out, and I wanted to list them here (placeholder only – usually all podcasts and notes will be available here, but that’s not working right now).

I promised the list: here it is!

Food, We Need to Talk, all episodes

Ten Percent Happier, episode #221

The Happiness Lab, Mistakenly Seeking Solitude

Whare are you loving?

Once upon a time, I fell in love with dogs. Well, really, I fell in love with my future wife Lala, and she had two dogs and I fell in love with them, too, and then suddenly, the world bloomed with dogs! It’s like when you buy a blue Nissan and then you see blue Nissans everywhere – I finally realized that dogs weren’t just mildly cute, but they were AWESOME and EVERYWHERE and after a while, I wanted one of my own.

We went to shelters one day. I was gonna get me a dog. I met Clara. I liked her a lot. We decided to think about her, so we went to breakfast. In the middle of breakfast, halfway across Oakland, I suddenly fell in love with her. “She’s mine!” I realized. “We have to go. Now! What if someone else gets her?”

We made it in time (there was another family looking at her then, but we got there first. So ha).

We took her home. The next morning, Lala and I were sitting on the back porch, eating bagels. The back door was open. Clara ran out and past us, a bagel held in her lower lip, the container of cream cheese in her upper lip.

Lala looked at me and said, “Your dog is so dumb. She forgot the knife.”

Clara was the nicest living being I’ve ever met. I never saw her get mad even once. She chewed up the whole house as a young dog, true. But she got over that (although she never gave up a chance to chew and rip up important papers).

But with people and other animals, she was the most empathetic dog I’ve ever seen. She’d play rough with big dogs, and softly with small ones. Once, a baby friend was visiting our house. The baby was propped up on the couch. She was old enough to sit and hold things but not walking yet. She dropped her teddy bear and it rolled off the couch. Clara picked it up and set it in front of her gently, nudging it just enough so the baby could grab it, and then they continued this game for half an hour.

This is how she played with little dogs:

Then we got her a cat (or really, we got two kittens, and Waylon chose her for his very own. Clara was bemused by this.

For many years, Waylon was usually wet. This is why:

Once, we were very broke. Lala really wanted a copy of the magazine The Shambala Sun. She bought it. She came home and put it on the counter. She walked away for five minutes, and when she returned, it was in pieces, torn to bits silently. Lala was mad. That was seven whole dollars, wasted. Torn up on the floor. Our friend Rachel O. heard this story. She subscribed Clara to the magazine, and to this day, Clara Hehu gets credit card offers and Buddhist donation appeals.

Her favorite place was the Albany Bulb, where she turned into a Sand Monster. Nothing made her happier than swimming and then rolling in the sand.

Clara was in my first book, Abigail’s dog in How to Knit a Love Song. In the American version, I forgot to get her out of Abigail’s truck before a cliff collapsed and TO THIS DAY, I get worried emails about Clara. (We caught it for the Australian version and left her safely tied to a tree, so these emails only come from Americans and Canadians.)

I’ve always, always been able to write back and say that Clara is okay. That she’s real. That she’s snoring safely behind my chair.

Because Clara was not only my best dog, but she’s also been my coworker for the last four years. Every other animal in this house loves Lala best, including Dozy (it just happens), but not Clara. She and I belonged to each other. Always near me, in these last few weeks, she’s been even more clingy, unwilling to let me out of her sight.

We ran hundreds of miles together. When I’d take a walk break, I’d say, “Walk.” Then I’d say, “Scritch,” and she’d raise her head and lean toward me. She was just the right height for me to scritch her ears without leaning over.

Lord, could she RUN.

She got sick about a month ago. Tumor in the stomach (that looked like a simple infection at first). We tried everything. She hated getting pills, but she never snapped or bit or even snarled.

Today, we took her to the beach she loved the best.

This is when she realized we were near the beach, and not the vet:

We had a wonderful (and excruciating) last walk. (Look, SF is visible behind her, as is the Golden Gate Bridge).

Clara was made of grace. When I think of the word, which I love, I see her face. She gave, and she loved, and she napped, and she just was.

I was gone for work for 9 days, and I just got home two days ago. When I got home, she was sleeping in front of the door, something she never did. She’d moved herself there right about the time my airplane had touched down, Lala said.

She’d waited for me to come home.

Goodnight, my sweetest girl. Run fast, and run free.