Pure Paradise

Something happened out there on the water today. As we were rowing, all eight of us novices, at first there was splashing and struggling. We were trying to balance the boat, the loudspeaker the coxswain was using was echoing and scratching with static. There were all-too loud whispers of some team members telling others what not to do. Then suddenly, without warning, for a brief period of about twenty seconds, all oars entered the water at the same time. All bodies pushed forward in unison. All legs pushed against the feet at once with the power we had been struggling to learn to harness for the past few practices.

The beauty was brief. Another boat’s wake passed and all too soon we were bobbing and struggling again, some too fast on the slide, others not using their power enough, some unable to get their oars out of the water, others splashing teammates in their faces. There were bent wrists that should have been straight, talking in the boat when there should have been none, but for a moment, we had done it. We each had the memory, the muscle memory, as our coach would have called it, of working as one. Now we knew where we were going. We had been there and back.

Our brains no longer had to teach our bodies. Our bodies had, at long last, received their marching orders through feeling. With any luck, with the right conditions on another glassy day on the Bay, they could do it again. Perhaps not just for twenty seconds. Perhaps for a full 2000 yards.

One of the many unexpected surprises since uprooting our family and moving out to California has been falling my way into becoming a member of the novice crew team in the local rowing club here. It happened accidentally, was unplanned and unsought. It started with a brief, two-hour introductory clinic that just happened to fit into our family’s schedule without too much upheaval, and happily turned out to be just the break I needed from unpacking boxes and mommyhood.

But to be part of a team? Regular practices at 5 a.m.? Just too much commitment, too strenuous, my head said, out of habit of protecting its long-sought-after sanity and much coveted sleep. Or was it? Like all good things that are meant to be, my body knew what was right. While my head reasoned and analyzed, making the oar of my life get out of synch, my body woke up that first day of practice and decided it was time to get out on the water. Being part of the team became muscle memory and sensing something greater at work than itself, my brain went quiet.

Rowing is something that on any other day, to any other person, at any other time in my life might have seemed difficult. But, as I have become humbled to learn, when something is aligned at my core, it falls easily into place. At just the right time. Whether my mind is ready or not.

Committing to crew was one of the simplest decisions I have ever made. That’s not to say that learning to row has been easy. I’m still too fast on the slide, breaking my wrist on the feather, and many other expressions that I never would have known what they meant before going out for that first practice. But, getting up in the morning, albeit sometimes painful, is always something I feel happy to do. And sometimes, when the water is quiet and still, the sun rising over the horizon, palm trees and mountains outlined in the morning light, the air just cold enough to make me awake enough to notice—well, then it’s pure paradise.