I swim at night in an ordinary pool in an ordinary town. It is winter.
A good reason to swim at night is to let the water blunt the edges of the day and absorb the accumulated grievances, serious or trifling. After I jump in, I stay below water and gaze at the deep end. Slowly, the pool organizes my vision into lines. The black line on the bottom that keeps us on course and honest. The black line on the ceiling mirroring the one in the depths. The horizontal lines of the wooden benches in the gallery, the railings around the wooden benches, the bunting across the width of the pool. The concrete diving boards are the vertical additions creating more right angles in this right-angled space.
We see in lines and swim in lines.
Except when we approach a wall and the upper body folds into the shape of a question mark—why? why are you doing this with your life?—before it uncoils into a straight line seconds later. Swimming continues, but the same question is asked again in 50 meters. In between the two walls, we follow the black line some more. After a while, the line becomes part of a large, moving modernist graphic of blue and black.
“A while” means long enough for a certain boredom of repetition to settle in, after 15, 20 laps, depending on the day. I read something once about the concept of mental boredom in swimming, especially in a pool: the same movements, the lack of visual stimuli, the uniformity of the unchanging environment. Activity turned into passivity. And yet, repetition—the source of boredom—also creates rhythm and flow. Repetition clarifies movements, gives them shape and definition. It is only through repetition that a swimmer approaches consistency. This is the ambivalence of habit to which many thinkers are attentive: habit dulls the mind and the senses, but it is also how we change. The nineteenth-century French philosopher Félix Ravaisson argued that one side of habit cannot exist without another: habit is both will and mechanical repetition.
This is true of any habit, but a swimming pool is also the architecture of habit. A space of intense regulation and many protocols but a space that nonetheless represents the possibility of endless resets. Any wall is the end but also the beginning of a lap. It is a space where time is kind. The digital clock counts from 0 to 60 and then back to 0.
The possibility of endless resets. The possibility of a quiet revolution.
At least until 10.55pm, when the lifeguards blow the whistle and usher us out. I walk home. The world does not look more enchanted to me for having gone swimming. Nothing glows, the ice is treacherous, the cold and discomfort are real.
I continue to swim at night.
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Dragana Obradović currently swims and lives in Toronto.