I’ve battled with the idea of talking about my swimming
career on this blog for a long time now, thinking of the pros and cons of
sharing; for myself, and for others. To tackle this fear, I’ve done a lot of
thinking, reading, talking and most importantly listening to those in my life
whom I look up to, and to those who have accomplished things I hope to
accomplish one day (in the water & out). By doing this, I’ve noticed one
reoccurring theme-we ALL struggle.
This is something that has helped me a lot lately- realizing,
understanding and absorbing the struggles of everyday life-because that’s all
it is-LIFE. Have you ever heard the saying “don’t make a mountain out of a mole
hill?” Well that was me, pretty much all the time, about everything! Yes, I’ll
admit it, I was that person who made everything a ‘thing’. I didn’t realize it
when I did it, (no one ever does), but I was much more negatively minded that
positively. Don’t get me wrong…this blog post is not going to be about how to
make all your thoughts positive (because I am still of the belief that that is
humanely impossible~but I’ve been proven wrong before), but rather about
‘absorbing’ the struggles and not reacting to them.
One thing I want to note is that struggle is a form of being
that we should all start to become more comfortable with. I know this may be
hard to come to grips with, because every inch of our man made environment
tries to convince us otherwise (diet pills, plastic surgery, the ‘shake’
weight, “How to lose weight without exercising or eating healthier” (I’m pretty
sure that someone is going write a book with that title soon) but that is not
life-that is commercial TV advertising, and it stops there. Life is a struggle,
day in and day out, it’s not easy and it never becomes ‘just right’. This is
what I’ve had to learn through my swimming.
I’ve had numerous moments when I wanted to quit swimming (I
know-shocking right? LOL), luckily for me, I’ve never allowed myself to get to
that point because there was always something inside, holding me back,
something telling me that I wasn’t finished just yet. I kept on. I wanted to
quit again. I kept going. And again-and I kept going. And so here I am today, still
going.
It took me a while, but finally after all the thinking,
reading, talking & listening, I figured out what that ‘thing’ was. And
guess what-It’s all of YOU.
It was said to me once that
“If you’re mission is bigger than the ‘gold’, you can’t not
get the gold. The ‘gold’ is ON the way, not IN the way.”
Let me explain…
I spent years swimming every single race thinking about
myself, and only myself. I would think about a specific goal time or place that
I wanted to hit, or a person that I wanted to please. I thought that if I
didn’t keep these things at the forefront of my mind, that I would fail.
Funnily enough, I always swam my fastest when I didn’t think about these things
(so I’m not quite sure why it’s taken me so long to get here-but hey, I’m just
thankful). After ‘failing’ at so many races, I started to question my swimming,
why I was doing it, and why I wasn’t getting any faster (this was me reacting
to my struggle, rather than absorbing it). I knew it wasn’t physical, because
it wasn’t showing up in practice-but only in a race. I thought about these
things so much that I lost sight of the real joys of the sport and how much I
had already gained from doing it. Then it hit me… that extremely hot day in
Madagascar when I went for a dip in the ocean (refer to blog post “A little
piece of heaven” if you don’t know what I’m talking about).
Long story short, I realized that my love for swimming was
not for fast times or gold medals, but for the amount of people I could reach
in a positive way through the skills I’ve gained from the sport. I then thought
about all the ‘material’ joys I had experienced throughout my swimming career,
and what it was that brought me so much happiness from these achievements-and
it all came down to YOU.
YOU-the child who learned how to swim under my watch
YOU-the children who will go to the Olympics and win medals
for The Bahamas
YOU-the multiple Bahamian children who have attended and
will attend University on a swimming scholarship
YOU-The Bahamian public who now semi-follow swimming
YOU-the child that has and will break all of my swimming
records
You see, it isn’t about me at all, but about the small
difference I may make in the youth of my beloved Bahamaland and the world.
It is about absorbing the struggle, to reach a place that
will touch not only myself, but others as well. And believe it or not, that
tiny, minute difference it SO MUCH BIGGER THAN THE GOLD.
