bearing blog

Tired, in the pool.

Yesterday evening I arrived at the YMCA pool to find it moderately crowded -- three lanes occupied by swim lessons, and three lap lanes each occupied by one swimmer.   I picked the swimmer closest to the wall, waited until she came up for air at my end, and asked, "Can I split with you?"  She agreed, and moved towards the wall to give me half the lane.   I kicked off my flip-flops, sat down with my feet in the water, and fiddled with my goggles to make sure I would get them right side up.

Here's how lap pool etiquette works:

 If N_swimmers ≤ N_lanes, each swimmer gets his or her own lane (unless you came with a friend or child and you want to share).  As additional swimmers arrive, the swimmers who are already there must allow the new arrivals to share:  that's the posted rule.   Common courtesy and safety call for the arriving swimmer to get a swimmer's attention and ask to share, as I did; this prevents collisions.

If you're a new arrival and you join a lane with one other swimmer, then the two of you "split" the lane:  each goes back and forth in his own half-lane.  This works up to N_swimmers ≤ 2 N_lanes .  

Once there are two swimmers in every lane, and another person arrives -- getting the attention of both the people who occupy it, of course -- three swimmers can share a lane, not by splitting it, but by "circling."  This means you swim along one half of the lane, turn, and come back along the other half of the lane, keeping to your right.  With only three in the lane it isn't too hard to pass slower swimmers (on the left).  As you get up to four and five in the lane, it still works if everybody swims close to the same speed.  

One thing you don't do:  get in a lane that has two people already in it when it still holds that N_swimmers ≤ N_lanes.  Because it's much more inconvenient to circle-swim than to split a lane, and everybody knows it.

I got my goggles on my head and looked up, and there was a man slowly water-jogging in the lane, next to the wall, about 8 yards away.  Where did he come from?  He saw my confused look, smiled widely, and beckoned me into the water with both hands.

I pointed to the other lane.  "There's room in that lane," I said.

"It's all right!" he beamed at me.  "Come on in!"  He said something else, but it was garbled by the noise of the pool.

"I can't hear you," I called.  I pointed across at the other swimmer, who was just about to turn and head back.  "Does she know you're in this lane?"

"It's all right!"  He opened his arms widely and beckoned again.  "Come on in, it's all right!"

It seemed a little dumb to say "I was here first!" since I could move into the next lane just as easily as he could, but I suspected that the other swimmer didn't know he was in there and wasn't expecting him -- and he was occupying her half of the lane.   Occasionally you run into people who aren't aware of the rules.  I literally ran into someone, once, who hadn't been aware of the "get the other swimmer's attention before entering an occupied lane" rule.  My neck hurt for a week.   So I was just about to explain:  You have to ask first.

And then he got closer and said, "Hey!  It's all right!  Come on in!  I'm not bothering anybody, I'm just showing off my awesome body!  I've been working out, you know?  So come on in with me!"

And he flexed.

Really.

Gross.

I don't know how well the subtleties of the expression change from "You are clueless about lane etiquette and I should help you out by explaining it" to "You are, in fact, an asshole" are communicated when one is wearing goggles.  Anyway, I very quickly calculated that I was not getting into the lane with this guy, nor was I getting into the lane next to this guy.  I grabbed my flip-flops and started to stand up, and before I even reached a standing position (which was the position in which I was going to think about how to get the other swimmer's attention), the lifeguard was at my side and the man was moving away.

"Excuse me," said the lifeguard, a young man whose name I don't know but whom I have seen many times.  "What's the issue here?"

I told him how the water-jogging flexer had appeared in the lane without asking, briefly described the exchange in which the water-jogger extolled the awesomeness of his body, and aped the flexing motion.

"I'll take care of it," he said.  "You go ahead and swim in this lane."

So I did -- eventually.  At the far end of the pool, the lifeguard spent several minutes standing poolside in conversation with Mr. Wonderful who was still in the lane.  The other swimmer came up and asked what happened, so I explained.  The man in the next lane came up and asked, "Do you need to split with me?" and I confused him, probably, by saying "I don't think so..."  But eventually the asshole got out of the pool, so I got in and started swimming my laps along with the first woman.

And then Mr. I'm-so-awesome came back to the end of the lane and stood there and watched us for a good ten minutes.  I ignored him.  Eventually he walked away... but only as far as the lifeguard's chair.  I kept an eye on him as I swam.  There were two lifeguards on duty that evening, and the stranger engaged them in conversation for something like twenty more minutes.  Which is ridiculous in lifeguard minutes.  You can say hi to the lifeguard, you can ask a question about which lane you should choose or how long until open swim ends, but they have a job to do which is not chatting.  

I began to wonder whether I was going to have a problem when I got out of the water.

Fortunately, the attention span of this particular asshole was shorter than my workout.  He left (through the Family Changing Room) and I didn't see him again. 

When I finished my 45 minutes, I went over to the lifeguard and let him know I appreciated him dealing with the asshole so that I did not have to.  "No problem," he said.  "That guy was behaving really inappropriately even before you got here.  The manager dealt with him.  Said he smelled something on his breath."  I thanked him again and went to change.

+ + +

Over a bottle of wine at dinner I told the story to Mark.  "I had a lot of time in the pool to contemplate why the man's behavior, even though objectively it doesn't seem like much, was so threatening," I said.  

"It's because he communicated, in several ways, 'I am not going to abide by the normal limits of behavior,'" Mark suggested.

"Yes, I think that's it," I mused.  "You're forced to wonder, 'What other rules of appropriate behavior are you going to ignore?'"

"Which made him not actually dangerous, since you weren't going to ignore those signals.  Threatening but ultimately not competent enough to be dangerous."

"Yes, I have a pretty well-refined asshole detection algorithm."  

+ + +

But I thought to myself:  Lots of people are socialized to suppress a reaction to those signals:  they have their boundaries damaged or destroyed at a young age, or they are taught to be nice, or ridiculed for objecting to unwanted attention ("Don't flatter yourself!" -- as if there is no such thing as unwanted attention, as if swaggering boundary-pushing had anything to do with real interest in persons as persons instead of as some kind of icon that can be clicked).

(In my case, there in the pool, I was mainly pissed off that the guy was in my way.  I only had an hour free for my workout.  I was there first, and he should have gotten in the lane with one of the lone swimmers instead of interfering with the only lane that happened to contain two women.  Asshole.)

So, no, not dangerous.  Not to me, in that place.  And the Y staff dealt with him fast enough that my workout was only diminished by about five minutes.  Props to them.

But still: a symptom, a reminder, of all the things that make it incrementally just a bit more exhausting to be female.  I'm lucky.  I go a long time between these events; my lifestyle insulates me a bit.  But they're still out there.  

Mindfulness and irritation.

Last week or so I wrote a post explaining why I am suddenly, and somewhat reluctantly, reading about "mindfulness" (short answer: therapy. Long explanation -- just go read the post).

I have been trying to be mindful, or to think about mindfulness, as I go about my day doing different sorts of things. One of the funny things about mindfulness, unlike most other things I have tried to take on, is that when you are thinking about it you are almost by definition not practicing it.

But old habits die hard. Most of my experience with taking on new things has been that time spent thinking about what I am taking on is time "working on" my new direction, because it helps me understand it thoroughly, or ar least to form a theory about it. I have a nagging suspicion that this may not be the case here, but I can't help myself.

So, for instance, today I was running around the track at the YMCA while my 6yo was in his swimming lesson. I thought to myself that I should try being mindful, so for a while I concentrated on thinking about nothing except to carefully notice the sensations of the soles of my shoes striking the floor.

But my mind wandered and wandered again, and eventually I got a little bit bored and decided to think about mindfulness for a while.

I was not alone on the 1/18-mile track, although I was the fastest runner there today. There was an older gentleman walking along, absorbed in whatever auditory stimulus was being spooled into his ears via a wire emerging from the pocket of his tracksuit. There was a father and his daughter about the age of my daughter, having just stretched in the little alcove off the track, jogging along. There was a slim woman chatting on a cell phone while she walked easily around the track.

And there was a woman who was ignoring the posted rule that slower walkers are supposed to walk next to the inside rail of the track and allow faster people to pass on the outside. She was walking pretty slowly, and she was hugging the outside wall. So even though the rule is "Runners must pass on the outside," she made me have to shift over to pass her on the inside. Every. Time. I. Went. Around.

This irritated me. It made me want to throw her an annoyed glance, or pass extra fast and a little bit too close. And then I scolded myself for being irritated about something that didn't actually hurt anyone, at least not much.

But I went on thinking about mindfulness as my soles struck the floor, around and around. I thought: Mindfulness is supposed to mean "allowing what is, to be." Or something like that. Not fighting against, or being judgmental about, your circumstances. And this is supposed to be good for me because I am never satisfied with my circumstances, or with myself within them, or something like that.

The first step, if I was a little more practiced at the mindfulness thing, would be: I would notice my irritation at the woman walking on the wrong side of the track, and then -- understanding that it is natural to feel irritated when I see someone ignoring a posted rule -- I would observe, also, that it is possible to pass the woman easily on the inside, and so I would allow my irritation to pass away naturally, without feeling that I should act on it or communicate that irritation to the walking woman. The irritation would be as a cloud in my mental sky, which would arrive in its own time and which I would be confident would depart in its own time.

If I were a bit more advanced, I mused: I might never get to the irritation stage at all. Instead of noticing my irritation I might only notice the woman walking, and simply adjust my stride to pass her appropriately, without ever feeling, you know, judgy. It is what it is. There is someone in my path, and I can just go around her, so I will, and I do not even need to have a feeling about it. The observation of a person in my path would be as a cloud in my mental sky, which would arrive, be noticed, be acted upon, and then not be thought of anymore.

It strikes me that both of these would be better, objectively, than shooting the irritated side-eye at the woman every time I passed. Probably I should try to cultivate, first the easier ability, then the more advanced one.

+ + +

On further contemplation (I had plenty of opportunities, since I had to pass on the inside every time I came around) it struck me that a still better way would be a way, not of merely observing in a detached way, but of connecting with the woman as a human person. Not just allowing the things around me, as they are, or at least as I observe them, to be; but accepting the persons around me, as they are, to be as complex as they are, in a way that is much richer than my powers of observation can ever know.

Things are (usually) no more than we observe them to be, and so it is right and good for us to detach from any irritableness about how they seem, and from our wishes that things might be different (at least when we are relatively powerless to change them, or when we know we won't make the choices that would change them because we have other priorities).

But people are infinitely more than what we see when we look at them.

It is possible, I thought to myself as I went around the track, that the woman is keeping so close to the outside wall because she is staying as far away from the railing overlooking the basketball court as she can. Maybe she is afraid of heights, or gets attacks of vertigo. If that is so, then it's good that she is sticking as close to the wall as she is; she is making it easy for me to pass her on the "wrong" side, instead of making it equally difficult to pass on either side as she would be doing if she walked in the center of the track.

It is just a possibility, but it is enough to change irritation into -- not detachment -- but something closer to compassion.

+ + +

The last way is not really something new for me. I have spent a lot of my time trying to abolish "bad" irritable feelings in the third way, by trying to come up with a theory by which it might be possible that some bothersome behavior is actually a good behavior under the circumstances, or at least the best that someone can do. I still think it might be a better way (at least when dealing with people instead of inanimate objects) than mere detachment.

Still, I think it will be a worthy exercise to try to step back and cultivate the detachment as a separate process. Maybe I will leave an empty space behind where compassion will have even more room to grow.

 

Posted with Blogsy