Swim Bad Ramble



I was at the local pool the other day with my daughter, little Bonnie. The local pool, or "Bad", is this fun-theme-park thing called, wait for it, Filderado.
It's in a town called Filderstadt. When I heard the name I thought it was a Mexican restaurant chain.
But no, it's a water park. It's got a big loopy-loopy water slide. It's got a double decker water slide. It's got a water jump slide. It's got a little pink elephant next to the wading pool (more my speed) and it's got a sauna, a salt crystal room (heaven, mostly cos no one except me is ever in there), and heated pools of different temperatures and salt/chloride mixtures.
Being a German pool it is packed to the rafters with shower sandals. If there is a national German garment then the shower sandal is it. The shower sandal is specifically designed to make other swimmers aware that yes, you do in fact own and are prepared to wear your shower sandals to the pool, in the public shower, the toilet block, alongside the pool, the lake, the pond, the river, the beach (ha ha ha ha).
It has a social value only.
It is completely useless if you are trying to avoid either A.) slipping over on your ass, or B.) contracting athlete's foot or any other fungus transmitted by way of public places that are predominantly moist.

The shower sandal will not stay on your foot. It's not built that way. It's built to head a direction that is approximately 90 degrees to the right of the direction you want to travel in. So within about five strides your shower sandals will swivel around and turn into something more akin to ancient oriental pontoons designed to cross wide rivers of closely fitted tree logs.

It's no wonder the Germans are so good at sports which involve wearing uncomfortable footwear.

So while my daughter and I were in the steamiest of the regular pools we floated outside into the open air and found ourselves surrounded by no less than 150 perfectly bone-white bodies, swanning about with slightly surprised looks on their faces.

But for a moment, maybe ten seconds, they didn't look like people. They looked like angels in heaven. Like souls in bliss. Like decorations on some exotic cake. There were 150 of them but I was not discomforted by so many people in such close proximity... and neither was little Bonnie.
It felt almost as if we had died and gone to that other place. It reminded me of visions I had had when I was a small child of five or six. I call them visions because I don't know what else to call them.

These visions I had had were rememberances of some other time that included every other time. And everyone was there. And I knew them all.

Being at the pool brought all this back. Usually it happens in small individual incidents. When I meet someone, I almost always have the very strong feeling that I have met them before. It’s always like: “oh, you again.”

It is a form of insanity, I am sure, not to recognise these incidents in one's own life. They give my life the sense that everything is going along as it is supposed to go and that my own pitiful attempts to influence any outcomes are in the main unnecessary, to say the very least.

if every person you ever meet is a finger puppet of the universal consciousness, then we all must experience the world, fundamentally, from the same deep sense of self, sense of origin, sense of "I".

It's like when you are driving some place in your car, and someone is tailgating you cos they are in a hurry.  You can't imagine ever being in that much of a hurry that you would drive so close, so aggressive. But the next hour, or the next day, you are the one tailgating and you can't imagine ever being so impolite, so selfish, so inconsiderate as to drive so slowly as the person who you are now tailgating.

In our lives, we do the same thing. We can't believe someone else is so intolerant, so racist, so sexist, so aggressive, so mean, so lazy, so thoughtless. And someone else thinks the same of us, and on it goes. But we all operate from the same sense of incredible and unknowable depth... the eternal darkness, the silence, the sense of importance, of permanence, of inner peace and somehow, of knowing.

When gurus say you should look "within" instead of "without" they mean that inside each of us is, literally as well as figuratively, the origins of everything.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

More Excerpts from: "Life Tips For The Young (What Stuff Really Means)"

Tentin Quarantino