Small Steps In The Tidal Pool

written by Anne SkyvingtonJanuary 19, 2023

Getting In…

I do some of my best thinking these days in our tidal pool in winter. Mum always said I was the one child out of the five of us who needed an extra blanket at night. I’d entered pools like an inch worm, emitting from the shock of the cold, a noise like a whale makes only from joy not pain at being in its watery domicile. Today I slipped into the water and played and swam for thirty minutes, like a baby in the briny womb.

The belief that I was cold adverse had become part of my DNA. I decided to challenge this last autumn by taking tiny steps. From little steps big things grow! Lao Tzu, a contemporary of Confucius in the 6th Century BC, is reputed to have said, ‘the journey of a thousand miles begins with one step’.

Today my thought was how many thousands of anonymous people down through the eons had wondered, as I was wondering at that moment, about the mystery of living. How many individuals had arrived in their twilight years, realising or knowing, ‘things’ that so many others had thought in their own idiosyncratic ways, without claiming ownership of them, without being able to express them or share them with others.

Difficulties Of Expression

When I was home and warm after a hot shower, I began to think about the problem of putting our thoughts into words. Words are clunky. Thoughts are like clouds that come and then disappear. My exact thought while in the pool had already evaporated, and my verbal expression of it was not an exact replication of it into sentences, built from clauses, phrases and words.

I tried to remember and pull up out of the unconscious mire, the exact thought that I had had. Without success. I knew that it was something to do with steps, mystery and the great unknown. It was linked, somehow, to my slicing my ageing body like a dolphin through the freezing waters, as if a force that only I could feel and know, were propelling me to continue.

Left Over Questions

Was it inviting me to lengthen the faltering steps into an arc that might reach up into the skies and become lucidly clear to me? A meaningful trajectory? It remained a kind of magic. Ineffable. But one that I desired to repeat again and again.