Edel Coffey: Learning as an adult and trusting the process
Picture: Bríd O'Donovan
I didn't learn to swim until I was 27. I’ve always had a fear of water, the same with flying, probably because I didn’t really do these things very often — or at all — as a child. And I like having my feet firmly on the ground. I don’t like the feeling of handing over control.
I only learned to swim in my twenties under duress. I had started going on foreign holidays, and was embarrassed as friends cannonballed into pools, or threw each other in, while I sat paddling my legs at the edge.
I had no grand ambitions to become a sea swimmer or someone who did one hundred laps before breakfast. I just wanted to acquit myself with dignity during that one week of every year when I found myself by a pool.
And so, after six weeks of swimming lessons, and developing a pioneering hybrid of a breaststroke and doggy paddle, I was able to swim well enough to get by. And that head-out-of-the-water doggy paddle has stood me in good stead … until now.
I realised a few months ago, as I watched my youngest child turbo-kick away from me like an amphibious creature, that I was going to have to improve my appalling swimming as a matter of urgent parental responsibility.
And so, one phone call later, I found myself be-capped and be-goggled at a lunchtime swimming lesson in my local pool.
I wanted to quit before the very first lesson. Did I really need to know how to swim properly anyway? I knew the answer was yes but I still wanted to chicken out.
It’s hard forcing yourself to do things you’re afraid of or don’t really enjoy. Would I even be able to do it, I wondered?
Can you really teach an old dog new tricks or is there a point at which you just have to accept that the time for learning basic life skills has been and gone? I had to at least try.
At my first lesson, I had to do all of the things I blithely told my children that they should do during their swimming lessons.
It’s a lot easier shouting it from the edge of the pool than actually doing it I realised. I haven’t struggled to learn something so multi-co-ordinated since learning to drive.
Your legs have to do one thing, your arms another, and don’t forget the torso. And the breathing, you need to breathe too, that’s an important one. And count!
It was like learning clutch control while reversing around a corner all over again. Only worse — it was underwater.
The important thing, my instructor told me, was to practice in between lessons. Again, much like learning to drive. I committed to going to the pool on my way home from the school drop-off.
It’s a little embarrassing learning something new at an age when you feel you should really have mastered certain life skills.
I was certainly more than a little self-conscious as I walked up and down the pool, windmilling my arms to warm up, then humming underwater by the edge of the pool.
On my second day practising, part of the pool was cordoned off for the mummy-and-baby swimming lessons that were taking place.
So it was just me and a bunch of babies who were learning to swim. At least they could wail about it, I thought, although I think there was plenty of inner wailing coming from my direction too.
However, the more I practiced, the more the reluctance and fear started to give way to empowerment and even enjoyment, and the very gratifying realisation that learning to swim, like learning to do most things, was simply a process.
The more I did it, the less daunting it got. The more I did it, the better I got at doing it.
Children do this all the time. They learn new and scary things because they have faith that they will learn.
They believe it when a teacher tells them that doing X followed by Y and then practising it will result in them achieving a goal.
And they will generally keep trying until they get it, however long that may take. In other words, they trust the process.
For us adults, it’s a little different. My swimming instructor understands this. She keeps telling me with each new instruction — do not analyse this, just do it. She knows that that’s what we do as adults.
We get an instruction and then we break it down, we analyse it, find fault with it and tell ourselves we’ll never be able to do it.
But I am finding that the more I trust the process, the more I believe that following her simple instructions will lead to me being able to swim.
And it’s encouraging to discover that even if you don’t start off believing that you can do something, you can bypass that self-doubt by just focusing on the process, the simple steps that will eventually get you to where you want to go.
