Look After Yourself

It is summer and possibly today was the first, of what I imagine will be many, in which I felt genuinely bored. I have had a free house for a few days and various people have passed through the door, it has been nice. But today was a day in which I felt like not seeing people. I don’t know if this is a feeling that many people have. It is a feeling that human contact would make you retch. The complexity of navigating your way through a conversation is too draining for a day like today. So I decided to swim.

I used to swim to a very high standard, competing every weekend and dedicating well over 10 hours to the sport each week. It was a challenge to remain motivated, waking up at stupid o’clock and sustaining shoulder injuries regularly. I gave up swimming at college, the strain of A-Levels was far too much and something had to go. College does that to people, makes them give up on things they love. I wish I realised before it all finished that what I needed to do was look after myself and not just my grades. 

The swim reminded me of the beauty of concentration. My mind was focused on the stroke, how my hand was entering the water, my breathing pattern and the pace of each turn I completed. The swimming coaches I had encountered in my life seemed to still be glaring at me from poolside, expecting my technique to be spot on and ultimately going to berate me. My body was free from the confinements of dry land, there was no external pressure on me, just myself and the water. As I focused on the stroke, I realised this was another form of looking after myself. Not just body, but my mind.

There are hundreds of ways to ‘look after yourself’ and not all are going to work for you. I’ve recently been using the ‘Headspace’ app, a simple and well designed meditation tool for anyone. It isn’t too bad, friendly graphics and calming voices. However my mind struggles to slow down enough to have a blank mind, something pretty key to meditation. I can’t count my breathes when my imagination runs amuck. 

Something else, that I can recommend is talking- especially for men. For centuries the male emotional spectrum has been discouraged and limited. I know that I am three times more likely to kill myself than my girlfriend is, purely down to my gender. So to avoid becoming part of that sobering statistic, I talk. I talk all the time about what I am feeling, whether that be happy or sad. When I talk, my problems seem far smaller than what they are in the theatre of my mind. Sometimes it isn’t easy to find that one person who will listen and respect your privacy, but there is someone out there who will listen without judgement and will care.

So if you are bored this summer, look after yourself. Your body and mind are the only things you were born with and the only things you’ll die with.