10 Quotes by Bonnie Tsui

Three decades of swimming, of chasing equilibrium, have kept my head firmly above water. Swimming can enable survival in ways beyond the physical.

Franz Kafka observed that “the truth is always an abyss. One must – as in a swimming pool – dare to dive from the quivering springboard of trivial everyday experience and sink into the depths, in order later to rise again – laughing and fighting for breath – to the now doubly illuminated surface of things.

Important, too, is the pride we feel in the well-exercised body. “The fuller sense of self we have,” Young once told an interviewer, “the more responsibility we take for it.

I begin to realize that the physical repetition can be a kind of meditation that transcends the simple goal of winning a race.

Over time, swimming has shifted from mere mechanics and survival – a military skill, practiced by men – to achieve a more intangible significance: a form of recreation, a pleasure, something that can sharpen your spiritual as well as physical health. This idea of swimming for wellness, emotional resonance, whole personhood, rings true to me. The physical is intertwined with the psychological.

For many swimmers, the act of swimming is a tonic, in that old-fashioned sense of the word: it is a restorative, a stimulant, undertaken for a feeling of vigor and well-being. The word tonic comes from the Greek tonikos, “of or for stretching.” About a dozen people.

We dare to jump so we can see something new. And sometimes we do it to recover a sense of what we once had.

You don’t have to be a great swimmer to appreciate the benefits of sensory solitude and the equilibrium the water can bring.

Seawater is so similar in mineral content to human blood plasma that our white blood cells can survive and function in it for some time. I delight in my mental picture of this, the not-so-fanciful notion that we have seawater circulating in our veins.