What is it that makes the sea, the sea; the ocean, the ocean?
Is it just the voluminous extent of water, exchanging tides and currents between shores? Or the swirling vortices and ecosystems of marine life? Is it perhaps the alluring mystery of what lies beneath the surface, the darkness of fearsome, unknown depths—or is it that which lies on the surface; the reflected beauty of wayward spectres roaming the azure, the luminous sky-god blushing deeper and deeper until it kisses itself asunder?
I say there is more to it still; that when you stare at the great expanse stretching from the horizon all the way to your cliff or beach, your coast, from where safely you stare at it so entirely you lose a part of yourself to it, then you get a sense of what the sea, and even more so the ocean, is.
It is an expanse of water which shows no obstacles on the surface, yet which you cannot cross by yourself; you can’t swim it, you can’t overcome it. Even if you could walk across it, you couldn’t walk across it—before reaching the other end, you would die of hunger. (Or perhaps of dehydration.)
Looking at the ocean, I am always compelled to involuntary admiration. Not that I mind. I cannot but respect its vast and mighty beauty. But sometimes I wonder at what lays behind it.
I went to physiotherapy last week, to talk about my having been having joint pains, most strongly in my wrists and knees. My wrists getting permanently damaged would be disastrous for writing. Dictation in word has gotten good, but when trying it to save my bones and tendons from overwork, the ‘doing writing’ felt different. It is much more satisfying to create the words on my own. Sure, writing is a thing you do with your mind and voice, too, but I prefer for the final product to have sprung from my fingers.
For half a decade or longer, my sports process had been to work out or do whatever active thing, get injured, pause to heal, and get right back to it. The last pause lasted for a few years.
Five months ago, my wrists started hurting. I wrapped them in those wrist-restraining wraps and kept typing, but the stinging got worse, so I largely stopped typing with my hands for a while. (Except for in the office where I worked one day in the week as content writer—I did not want to be talking to myself out loud there.)
I also decided to pick up sports again, starting with jogging, two and a half months ago. But my knees came to sting intensely while running. I paused exercising once again, waiting to heal whatever wanted to heal so I could pick up where I’d left off.
That didn’t happen. The pains remained.
When I went to physiotherapy last week, I learned it was precisely my process that had been my problem. Bodies get weaker in periods of rest. Like how muscle slowly builds when being used, muscles slowly degrade when not being activated as much. However when I’d get back into sporting, I had always done so continuing where I’d left off before. I didn’t want to go back and do things I’d already done; that seemed like a waste. I didn’t try too hard at not trying too hard.
Inevitably this meant I would eventually overwork something and have to pause again, to have to then refuse starting from even further back. Over the years, the physical ability I had been building up since childhood has shrunk and dilapidated. The same has gone for much of my confidence in my body.
My lifestyle has been sedentary, in that I sit on my ass for 10-12 hours a day. There has been little stimulation for my body to stay as strong as it was. So the recommendation I got from my physiotherapist was to try things that involved more movement as an experiment. Upon (re)discovery of an activity I loved, or at least liked, I should then integrate that into my living, and adapt my lifestyle pattern to a more physically healthy one. Go to the gym a couple of times a week, to help build the strength in my body that would allow stretches of writing activities and sitting. Swim, play basketball, walk, or all of the above (beside). So long as I would keep doing it, with enough pauses and space for slow progress built in. I thought I’d start by taking up taking intermittent walks. Which, with slow-to-medium speed, brings me to today.
Winter is about one-third past. The days still get dark early and rains still subdue much of the available daylight. Wanting to get my low-level physical movement in, I go outside when the evening hasn’t fully swept over the afternoon yet.
My neighbourhood is basically a multi-ZIP code rectangle, with stone-tiled pavements and wilding footpaths branching off the main roads between the apartment buildings. I’ve strolled many of them. By combining the different branches, I could go a thousand different routes. And then I might still find paths I haven’t walked.
The apartment building I live in is in the middle of one of the wider outside lines of the rectangle. (Lines that are 1.5KM-long roads.) I step out the main hallway and allow the wind to push me to one side of the building. Beside its brick wall I am safe from more such gusts of cold air, but not from the drizzle. Much of the beige stones is painted a careless tint darker by the thin rain. I keep on going.
Walking a normal pace, I soon feel warmth spreading throughout my legs. I reach the other wide line of the rectangle and turn left, beneath rows of tall trees, deciding myself towards a supermarket.
What happens in said supermarket is the reverse of the usual: while my motive had been to get just some snacks, I also end up with groceries.
Outside it’s become night, and it has started actually raining. No more drizzle. I opt for a shorter route home.
An above-ground metro overtakes me, a chain of bright, fogged-up squares curving away through the dark. Rain is pitter-pattering on the hood of my jacket like small duck feet. The many tall, dreary trees provide no relief except aesthetic. Imposing as they are, they convey a sombre beauty. Then there is a split in the road.
The right prong is a stone lane through grass and foliage, a diagonal shortcut directly to the high apartment building separated by a street from my building’s garden. Although it must be a quicker route home, I have never walked it. The few times I had passed by here, I hadn’t been in need of a shortcut.
I begin upon it. But after ten metres, I stop. There seems to be another building on my path, shimmering in the low light of the single lamppost, agitated by the rain. I see the bright-lit walkways of that tall building, upside down, reflected, in a pool of water.
Without drains, the dent apparently in the ground here has become a basin. Bending over I spot no downside-up dents above the surface either; no unreflective isles of stone to jump onwards on. The pool is some fifteen meters long, and wider than the footpath, having drowned the grasses to mud. I think at it, estimating my chances. Now that I am here, I don’t want to turn around and go back the way I came, I don’t like doing that on walks. It feels like a waste.
I could run through the water in a few seconds, but not without drenching my shoes and socks. And if the seabed runs deeper than I can foresee—I don’t know how big the dent is since I’ve never walked this path before, and there are some rather significant craters in the area—my lower pants will get soaked. Then back home the ground will get wet and better-to-be-dried-a.s.a.p., since I hadn’t put a towel beside the door to dry my feet. None of those things I want.
The expanse of water before me is effectively limitless, because it is an absolute barrier. As I am, possessing a desire to return home with dry feet and shoes and pants, I cannot overcome it. I am looking at an ocean.
An obstacle prevents you from doing something in some way. If I hadn’t wanted to go home quickly, the pool would not have been an obstacle. If I’d been wearing my rain onesie, I could’ve just waded through without my feet getting wet; the pool would not have been an obstacle. If I had sported wisely the past few years, I wouldn’t have been here, now, and the pool wouldn’t have been an obstacle. But I had lived poorly, and I had gone out to walk; I had gotten snacks, and I had wanted to walk home directly, with dry feet, without turning back. And the pool has become an obstacle. An ocean that I, as I am, cannot cross.
To get to the other side of the obstacle, a change is necessary. I can either let go of my dislike of wet shoes and just take the pool in stride, or I can change my lifestyle: I can go back the way I’ve already come and take a longer path—as I’m goal-bound, not route-bound. I walk on.
And when I get home, my feet are dry.
