Circle Swimming

On Monday morning, I arrived at the pool later than I like to. If I can get up by 5:40, I can get to the Jewish Community Center when it opens at 6:00, swim and shower, and be back home to get the morning crew going by around 7:30. If I’m thrown off by more than 15 or 20 minutes, I have to give up the prospect of a swim for the day.

Because I arrived at the pool at around 6:20, it was already full this morning. A couple people hung around the edges, waiting for a lane to open up, but I didn’t. I started a circle swim in one lane, and one of the waiters asked the lifeguard to help him start one in the center lane. The policy at the J is that when three or more people need a lane, everyone needs to circle swim. Circle swimming isn’t too difficult, especially if people swim at around the same speed, but it does take coordination among the swimmers. I’ve seen people stubbornly pretend they don’t understand the request (even though the rules are posted also in Russian, the dominant second language at the J) or get out of the pool altogether, but I have rarely seen a swimmer get as angry about it as I did this morning.

When the lifeguard asked Mr. Angry if he minded circle swimming, he angrily replied “I do mind” and got out of the pool to berate the lifeguard about what a stupid policy circle swimming was. His tone was not softened to account for the power differential between Mr. Angry and the kid who was lifeguarding; maybe it is easier to speak angrily to someone who is a third your age and makes a poor hourly rate. He pretended that I was not getting into the next lane over, looking right through me and suggesting that it was empty, that everyone else who wanted to swim could wait five or ten minutes and have a private half-lane to themselves. Among his reasons for not circle swimming was that he had paid to be at the pool (to which, the lifeguard responded reasonably, so had everyone else, since it’s pretty much only members who swim early in the morning; and, contradictorily but also rightly, that it was a public pool). He also pointed out that the other swimmers in the lane might get angry about their speed differential, since he was faster than the other swimmers in the lane and would have to pass them. Never mind that his belligerent tone was poisoning the atmosphere in the entire room.

What Mr. Angry seemed to miss altogether was that the J is also a religious and community center, and not just a place where you buy the right to exercise in private. When we are in community together, we do not just atomistically go about our business without regard for the people around us. We say hello to them in a civil fashion. We ask if we can help each other. We ask for help we need. And we share our space, deriving both the benefits and troubles of community life from the interaction.

In this light, circle swimming suddenly came to be a metaphor for the larger business of living in community together. No, it’s not ideal to have to share a lane with another person whose stroke is at a different speed (or who thinks that doing the butterfly in a shared lane is a good idea). But there are larger benefits of sharing the space, which we can appreciate only if we accommodate ourselves at least a little bit to the needs of our fellows.