Learning to Whip Kick

I took swimming lessons at the local pool when I was a kid. I was seven or eight years old when our instructors taught us how to “whip kick” in the water. As we learned it, the whip kick entailed a series of four distinct motions. It went something like this:

Raise up your knees. (Remember, this is all in the water, so you’re horizontal.)
Spread your legs as wide as you can with your knees up.
Unbend your knees, sending your legs back downward, still spread out
Bring your feet together swiftly, thus propelling yourself

It was a bit of a lot for very young children to keep in mind. “Up, out, down, and around” was the boiled-down guiding formula, I think. But it was still a somewhat detailed mechanical sequence for kids. I didn’t find it too hard though. Though I felt I was probably performing the motions clumsily, they seemed simple enough to remember.

Towards the end of that lesson, during our ten minutes or so of free time, the two instructors – young women, who at the time seemed very old to me – approached me and asked me, in a strangely curious way, to show them my whip kick once more. So I did. And then one of them leaned over me and said, smiling, “When you go home today, tell your mother that you have the best whip kick in the class.”

I was stunned and very happy. I had been a little intimidated by these two instructors and now it seemed they liked me. Moreover, although I was “a brain” at school, I’d never been complimented before in my life for anything remotely athletic.

Developing a Long-Term Relationship

I didn’t start by loving the water. For example, when I was 12, I went to summer sleep-away camp and I often didn’t even bother to swim with the other kids during swim time. My friends formed the theory that the water scared me, but that wasn’t it. I was just too lazy to get in and out of a bathing suit. Getting wet, drying off, changing again … it all just felt like such a production. I preferred to sit quietly in the shade somewhere and read a book.

My family moved from New Jersey to South Florida when I was 13 and I still didn’t catch the water bug until I was 16 or 17, when I came to rely on the ocean. I don’t remember exactly when the change occurred; maybe that was a gradual thing. I’d swim out so far, the lifeguards would lose their minds whistling me in, and I’d pretend I couldn’t hear them. I thought they were crazy. I knew I was safe. I knew in my bones that I was in the safest place in the world when I was in the ocean.

I often went in the water after hours, and at night, when there were no lifeguards to harass me. I preferred Dania Beach, where there no hotels on the beachfront, just dunes and shrubbery.

Meanwhile, my whip kick had decayed into some ambiguous improvisational thing. I no longer tried to execute the movements I’d learned back at the pool in New Jersey. Whatever I was doing with my legs and feet was serviceable enough for my propulsive needs, though in the back of my mind I always vaguely imagined I was doing it a little bit wrong and that my childhood swimming instructors would be disappointed in me if they could view me from some mysterious vantage point. I wasn’t really thinking this through carefully, obviously; these were just semi-delirious half-thoughts. The ocean put me into a dreamy state, as I thrashed like a child, often singing out loud. (And sure, I was high sometimes, though not necessarily.)

The Water Now

I’ve heard it said that you acquire aches and pains as you age. I’m not sure that has to be the case, or that it’s “natural,” but I do count myself among those for whom this is true. I have one or two minor pains I’m aware of consistently, like the one that limits the motion of my right shoulder and the one in my right knee.

And then there are the ones I scarcely notice; they’re so small. That is, I don’t notice them until I’m in the water. I guess you might call them “micro-discomforts.” When I’m submerged in water – whether it’s a river or a pool – it’s as if I go, “Oh yeah. That one.” And then my body reflexively moves in such a way that I feel better; the discomfort is relieved; my internal energies flow more smoothly; subtle beneficial realignments happen that refresh and restore me – and remain with me even after I’ve left the water.

I believe I’ve been doing some form of this “realigning” in the water all my life – feeling my feelings and my pains and letting them go, as I just allow my body to do what it wants to do, and let my mind go where it wants to go. When I was younger, it probably had more to do with releasing problematic emotions than with physical aches, but it was the same essential process. It still often makes me feel like singing (though I try and keep it quiet in the public pool).

The version of a whip kick that I do now is utterly unrecognizable from how I learned it. I can’t even begin to describe it, much less break it down into discrete motions. In fact, I never pay attention to it, and haven’t for decades. My feet and legs know what they’re doing. They are way ahead of my mind. And by now of course, I realize that doing it exactly as I was taught was never the point. Those instructions were merely a framework to get me started, until the intrinsic wisdom of my body would take over for the rest of my life.

Somewhere, on some level, whether they are still alive today or not, I know those two instructors are proud of me.

The Analogy (My Main Point)

I mentioned “micro-discomforts” that I perceive within my musculoskeletal structure (and perhaps my emotional body too) that smoothly and pleasurably resolve themselves when I’m swimming (or paddling around, or whatever). It would be a labor to try and describe the nature — or even, at times, the precise location — of said discomforts. But feeling them is the point.

I believe, in life, feeling our feelings is the key to bliss. Once we allow ourselves to just feel … something changes, something shifts, something heals.

It is currently in vogue to encourage children to identify and name their feelings. I think this is a good thing. Instead of screaming or hitting out at someone, the child is prompted to look inside and say, “I’m angry!” or “I’m frustrated!” or “I’m sad!”

“Use your words,” children are told. Often, based on the evidence in front of our eyes, this seems inadequate, because children will scream and cry anyway. Something yet remains unsatisfied (hey, that’s a feeling too!) in them.

And yet, I believe that it’s better to cultivate a habit of self-reflection in our kids, rather than just allowing them to act out or, worse yet, penalize them for having “unacceptable” feelings. So we provide them with all the approximate labels to use: sad, angry, grateful, hurt, excited, etc. But emotions have far more nuances and gradations than words do.

Maybe those words we provide children as tools to understand their own feelings are analogous to my old original whip kick instructions. They are clumsy, prosaic approximations of the real thing, but they provide a framework for feeling feelings, and initiate the habit of introspection, until a child’s native emotional intelligence takes over. Perhaps later in life then, they’ll be able to feel and observe more and more of their unique palette of emotions, even those that do not fit neatly into words, and this ability will enable them to flow and open to life more comfortably and happily (and civilly).