Reclaiming
I have been swimming in the North Sea since my forty-third birthday, and I have never once been comfortable getting in. This is not the point.
The point is the moment before, standing at the edge of the Victorian sea pool, the sky doing something utterly unreasonable with colour, the water holding it all back in reflection. The excitement is clean and specific, nothing like the background churn my brain usually runs on. This is different, somehow more pointed.
Then the water – icy needles everywhere at once. Not my usual internal noise, with the competing frequencies, the unranked bombardment of everything coming at me at the same volume, but just one thing, turned all the way up. Cold. Just cold. My skin reporting back from every inch of itself simultaneously and my brain, for once, with only one thing to process. Catching my breath and trying to return it to a natural rhythm as the sensation steals it from my lungs and I plough ahead, immersing myself more deeply.
This is the most focused I ever am. I didn’t understand this for a long time. I thought I was looking for calm but I’m not actually looking for calm. I’m seeking the one intensity that crowds everything else out, that speaks my brain’s own language but directs it somewhere clean. Singular and unmuddled.
At the far end of the pool the world narrows to a single wall like an infinity pool where the still water meets the North Sea. The surface inside the walls lies flat and obedient, a held breath in a man‑made shape. Beyond it, the sea churns in cold grey sheets, the wind dragging spray sideways, the horizon never quite steady. I force myself to swim towards it, gasping as the cold reaches new parts of my body, so I can watch the sun crack the horizon.
The Victorian sea pools of the east coast of Scotland were built for safety. Walls of dark rock holding the sea at a negotiable distance, wild water made manageable, the ocean’s force contained without being tamed. You get the cold, the salt, the aliveness of it. You get the sky enormous above you. But there is a wall.
I have spent time learning to love that wall.
I spent longer than that believing I needed to be the open sea, boundless, undirected, taking up whatever space was available when what I needed was this. The wild water in the held space -enough structure to be safe, enough wildness to be real.
I come without my dogs. They are idiots in water and consider my swimming a rescue situation requiring their immediate scrabbling intervention. So, I come alone, mostly. At sunrise, mostly. The sky turns and I stand in the icy needles, and my brain goes quiet in the only way it knows how, not by emptying, but by filling with one single, brilliant, freezing thing.
I swim to the wall where calm ends and wildness begins, my skin already tightening against the cold as the sun rises. The sea lifts and falls, calling in its rough language. I let the light and sound move through me until I feel the shift, small but certain, toward the water that refuses to be contained.
Something inside me settles as I immerse myself in the gentle swell of the constrained tide. The wind has taken what it can already, sanding down the noise and leaving only the truth of my own breath. Here, where the Scottish coastline offers no softness, I feel a steadier kind of quiet. That rawness is my reminder that I am still here, still moving, still part of this place that refuses to pretend for anyone.
I don’t entirely understand the compulsion to return so I have stopped trying to. Some things are true before they are understood, and this is one of them.
I am never too much for the water and it doesn’t ask me to be less. It simply is what it is, cold and indifferent and completely accepting, and I bring my whole self in, and it holds me every time.
Swim
Once, lost in the dark,
Lured by siren song.
Found, at dawn
Painted skies revealed.
Icy daggers threaten
To pierce my resolve;
Reluctance melts
Into frigid swells.
A vast unchanging body
Laps at containing walls.
Immersed
Both held and free.
Body hums with the
Song of the sea,
Compelled to return,
Composition clear
Surrender as the sun
Slices the seam
Between sea and sky,
Flaying thought from noise.
Joy surges,
The symphony crests,
Endless capacity
Met in kind.
Then treacherous ease
Turning tides of peace.
The movement ends.
Da capo.