I arrived at the hotel exhausted, only to be met with a situation that would have normally sent me into a spiral of frustration. But as it turns out, even the most stressful predicaments can have a silver lining. For us, that silver lining was a massive, pristine lap pool right there in the upgraded accommodation.
I looked at that water and thought about the wetsuit I’d packed. It’s the one I need to wear these days just to regulate my body temperature. Between the support of my parents, an actually accessible pool, and the rare luxury of having enough time and energy to carefully dress my grafted eye, I realised the stars had finally aligned.
So, after two and a half years of staying on the sidelines, I did it. I got in.
It was phenomenal (honestly, that deserves a whole blog post of its own), but more than that, it was a wake-up call. I hadn’t just missed the activity of swimming; I had completely forgotten how much I benefited from it, both physically and emotionally. As I floated, the relief didn’t just feel like water on my skin—it literally washed over me from the inside out.
But as the holiday wound down, a familiar fear started to creep in: I won’t be able to emulate this back home.
Back in my own realm
, life is faster. The environment isn’t always designed for ease, support isn’t as constant, and there’s the ever-present weight of time pressure. It’s so easy to look at a task like swimming and decide it’s just “too hard” because of the sheer number of barriers in the way.
We often talk ourselves out of the things we need most because the logistics feel like a mountain we can’t climb. Whether it’s the weather, the lack of support, or the physical prep required, we focus so much on the friction of the “doing” that we forget the huge, life-changing benefits of the “done.”
There will always be barriers. There will always be a reason why today isn’t the perfect day to try. But if we let the challenges win, we miss out on that overwhelming sense of relief that makes all the effort worth it.
Sometimes, the most important thing we can do is remind ourselves why we started in the first place. The benefits are still there, waiting for us and we just have to be willing to navigate the obstacles to reach them.
