A NEW SKILL ACQUIRED …

Umm … needed to start my blog with something. Guess the best thing to start with, would be my swimming experience. Swimming is one thing I was longing to learn right since my childhood. But, for some reason, it somehow just eluded me. The first time I tried to learn it was when I was about 15 years old. My father was my coach then. We were carrying on well for some days but eventually I developed a bout of bad cold, cough and chest congestion and I had to give it up.

Since then I have been trying to learn it on my own, but as you would imagine, with little success. Every time I used to go, people who could swim even little, used to give me a complex, making me wonder - ‘what the heck am I doing here’. Even my wife who had started just recently learnt quite fast from one of her friends. I used to see the swimming coach at times, barking instructions at the learners – mostly kids, who used to swim so beautifully and I made my resolve to enrol.

Recently I was at home on a block leave with no plans to go out of town as Saumya (my wife) could not take leave at the same time. Thought this would be an opportune time to enrol for swimming classes and I just joined without giving it a second thought.

Well … like any new skill that you try to acquire, it was a little grueling to begin with. My coach was a good guy, was not very hard at me as much as he was on the kids. The pool was 25m long and while he made me take 10 rounds, the poor kids were made to take as many as 40 rounds in the beginning which would increase to as much as 160-180!

For about 10 days, I used to go daily, twice a day. It used to leave me totally exhausted at the end of the day, what with my body aching at all parts. I did not know that I had muscles at so many places in my body! I also lost some of my precious weight…. L

And at last … it happened! … I learned swimming … I was so thrilled. It was almost as if I had learnt flying! I let my body be lifelessly light and actually feel the experience of swimming. I think swimming has really helped me to relax. You know, you have to relax your body in order to help it float and then you can effortlessly swim. I now go pretty regularly for swimming – every alternate day and yes … without the complex that I used to have earlier on.

You need to be relentless in the pursuit of a new skill and then the perseverance pays. With this new found confidence, I now look forward to learning some other craft - something which I have been trying to learn for quite sometime but have not been persistent enough to actually master it .. like playing an instrument (violin), learning a language (Malayalam and French comes immediately to my mind) .. shall surely keep you updated …