Standing at the edge of the diving board, looking straight down, I become aware of the distance I contain. There is a long way from my eyes to my toes, twice that from my toes to the surface of the water, and again from the surface to the bottom of the pool. There is only one way to go, from here to there (what goes up must come down!), and yet I wait. The inevitable chill intimidates me, I am enjoying being dry. Eventually I will be roused by my favorite song over the pool’s sound system, or my coach shouting up to me: have you fallen asleep up there?, and I’ll shift my weight to my toes.
Now the oscillation begins, it’s time to get a move on. Gravitational potential energy turns to kinetic as my heels lift and fall back on the board. Now the energy is there, stored within the board itself as elastic potential energy, ready to push me back up. So we stay like this, never breaking contact in a rocking give and take; trading energy between us in a swaying equilibrium.
I raise my arms above my head and the space within me expands. My ribs lift, my biceps graze my ears, my heels come up just a little higher. Even more potential, and back down. My hands descend pinkies first as they sink back behind my ears. My heels fall, this time my shoulders dropping with them as I bend my knees and press deeper into the board. Even more potential, and back up. As I straighten my legs the board presses the energy back, and I lift. We stay in careful balance, but now with space between us. Jump and land. Rise and fall.
The cycle continues. I push the board and the board pushes back. I’m slowly working up the nerve to be submerged, to commit, to, quite literally, take the plunge. Once I have left the board there is no return, once I am in the air I am headed for the water, and once I am in the water I am cold. There is only one way to go. Okay, it’s time.
The shift is imperceptible; I can barely feel it. I think it happens in my shoulders but my whole body is involved. This time, the give and take between the board and I shifts. The old push and pull has a new element, a new axis. I press the board not just down, but back, and it pushes me not just up, but forward. This is where the oscillation ends. I am no longer over the board; I am over air and soon, water.
I feel the air fall against me, my hair stretching down as my body ascends. I feel gravity’s tug as I move in tension against it. My momentum pulls me upward as my weight pools in my toes. As I reach the crest of my trajectory, the weight I feel shifts. Creeping up as though through my veins, it migrates from my ankles to my knees to my hips to my cheeks until eventually I feel the same tug in my fingers. Now I know I am falling. Sometimes I lock eyes with a friend on the way down, a swimmer across the pool. When this happens my heart lifts despite my descent, the only organ on which gravity seems to have no effect.
I don’t brace for impact. All of that procrastination, putting off the inevitable, and now that the moment is here I am excited; excited for the sound my feet will make as they break the surface, the feeling of being engulfed, the reviving power of chilly water. When my pointed toes pierce the plane dividing air and water there is a sound like a “crack,” but rough around the edges. Like something sharp, but jagged; rough and crisp. The water is colder than I expected and warmer than I feared as it rises in perfect rings around each foot, each ankle, each leg, around my waist, around my neck, until I am completely engulfed. It is quiet, and it is slow. In the air you can believe you exist untouched. In the water you are suspended.
The air I inhaled up there gets released down here, and I watch it gurgle to the surface. I am not sinking, but cutting to the bottom of the pool. Here, new rules apply. Rules I’m less familiar with, but have learned over years in the water. My toes barely brush the bottom, not nearly enough to load any force, and yet the tiniest flick of my foot against the tile brings me rocketing back to the surface.
Whatever I brought with me has been rinsed away. Treading water, I am awash in an eagerness, a focus and a naive sense of invincibility that was not there before, and that I do not experience dry. Perhaps the feeling is best described as clarity. In a day in college my mind is flooded with information and interpretation until I come to feel bogged down. It is all very dry. But now I am at practice, with my team, and I am here to dive.
I learn a lot in this place, but learning looks very different in a pool than in a classroom. Information is conveyed not in writing or often through words, but through movement. I watch what you do and feel it in me; a physiological empathy that allows the knowledge of bodies to be exchanged. Still, my mind attempts to lend a hand, to control my body with visualizations and commands. I tell my toes: point, or I tell my knees: straighten. Should I expect too much, my body responds with a grueling belly-flop that says don’t tell me what to do! There are dives I do that I don’t know how to do. I have no instructions for my body, no image in my mind’s eye of its execution. In these moments, I pray oh body don’t fail me now, and I take off. Nine times out of ten, my prayers are answered.
These dives require a sort of blind faith that brings new meaning to the maxim: trust yourself. In a world where your body is supposed to be silent, docile, mastered; mind over matter, they say, trusting your body is a radical act. I am not my mind. I am no more in my head than my toes, and they have taught me just as much. Diving is a sport that requires you to do things that you don’t know how to do. When I find, in fact, that I had the ability all along this doesn’t mean that my body knows something I don’t, it is proving me wrong. It is saying yes, you do know how to do this, but you were looking in the wrong place. When we try to access what we know, we’re taught to go looking in the mind, but so often our knowledge is stored in the body. That knowledge is no less mine than the physics of rising and falling, than the books and pages I shove in my locker before I change into my suit. That knowledge lives suspended within me. It is wet. It cannot claim to live untouched. We do so much learning on dry land, I think it’s about time we dive in.
I really, really love this piece! I like how you incorporated science into your sensorial description when talking about the mechanics of diving– it reads more as poetry than scientific explanation. The way you connect your diving experience to discussion about alternative forms of knowledge and broader themes of trust is really beautiful and well-done. This is a great example of how such a routine action or a behavior we are really familiar with can give way to deeper insights when viewed from a different perspective.
This was a really interesting piece to read. Bodily and sensory knowledge is hard to talk about, and I feel like you do it in a really interesting way here. I think it’s especially cool how you describe the relationships between your body and the things around you: you’re not just on the board, but in a “give and take” with it as you prepare for the dive. This speaks to some really interesting things in terms of the boundedness of the body, and that was interesting to see in a piece that deals with such a mundane (but also deeply personal) place.