The Story of Bo
Be like water
If you visit a beach in China you will notice hundreds of inflatable swim rings. Arm puffs on every child. Few people know how to swim well and would not jump in an open body of water without floatation devices. Even as a young adult you might be told it’s not worth the risk.
Consider a young Chinese man, Bo. He grew up not going into water. The few times he fell in he could splash his way to a shore and a friend fished him out. Bo’s life has not taken much of a toll from it. After all he is an educated urbanite. The fixation some people have with knowing how to swim well seems like a very suboptimal use of their time, thinks Bo, a clever and enlightened modern boy. What are the odds that you will need to save yourself or actually cross a river on your own? Mao encouraged it as a fitness feat but Bo takes propaganda with a grain of salt. There is no need for Bo to splash around like a child. He can take a boat if he needs to and would wear floating devices in an emergency anyway. Bo is fine, and Bo grows up to be a fine man without becoming a good swimmer.
Now Bo enters university and does quite well in the engineering department. He doesn’t think about swimming at all (except he notices a girl he courts for a a few months seems to linger with her gaze on the swim team when they walk by). In his first year as a Master’s student he gets the chance to do a full year exchange program at an engineering university in Sweden, where he finds a core friend group of mostly exchange students. To commemorate the end of their exchange year they plan a midsummer trip together. They rent a cabin near in the forest where they spend a weekend. They drink. They play music. They act in all the awkward and brave and romantic ways that young students are supposed to on such a get-away. And on Saturday night after building a pit fire and singing and hugging and talking about how they are all going to miss each other and how they will stay in touch, a French boy suggest they go skinny dipping. The water is blank as a mirror, it’s only a few hours past midnight but the sky is already getting brighter again. His friends calm Bo and say he will be fine and they will stay close to him and it’s not very deep anyway.
Bo removes everything but his underwear and tiptoe across the grass with the others. There is no wind and the mosquitos are all over him. The grass is cold and twigs and stones dig into his feet. He enters the water and it’s surprises him how warm it is. He wades in to about waist height. He sinks down. Two of the girls are whispering and laughing a few meters next to him, the French boy and his friend are racing towards the middle of the lake splashing wildly. Bo sits down and floats for a bit with his heels gently rested on the bottom. He wiggles out off his underwear. He lowers his head almost to the surface, feels a slight current on his ass, feels the temperature gradient across his body, listens to the light splashes of his own hands. He looks at the brightening sky and as immersed, feels the nervouseness fade but the chilliness making his heart still race and his skin numb. The pretentions about swimming being dumb disslove. Bo is an engineer and a bright boy. He knows not to deny what is staring him in the face. He’s never floated in open water in his life yet he feels at home. It can’t be his own memory, it’s his ancestors’ memory, passed down from soul to soul, of a primal home, and natural activity that he hand a thousand generations before him were born to do. Shivering, with banged up feet, drenched underwear floating in his hand under water, drunk, and giggling. The girls asks if he is okay. He tells them yeah.
You are an enlightened urbanite. You grew up being told not to get into fights. To use your words. The few scruffs and close calls you got into growing up don’t affect you much today. The fixation some people have with fighting seems like a very suboptimal use of their time. And barbaric if you’re quite honest. Why would you ever get into a fight? Just call the cops. Back down and be the bigger man. There is no need for you to tumble around and scrap like a child with ather adults. You are fine, and you grew up to be a fine adult without learning how to fight. You are getting a bit sick of me telling you that you should come try it, just to see what it feels like.