I decided to go for a swim in this lake the other day.
I expected it to be as freezing cold as all the other mountain-fed water I’ve swum in so far. But the water was actually quite nice and the experience was invigorating. Bracingly cold, but indefinitely bearable; no ice-cream headache.
Afterwards I felt very relaxed, chilled, grounded, centred. It just felt right. The feeling was visceral and simple and pure, much like a vivid childhood memory that I have: of being nine years old, at the very start of summer, in my summer school uniform outside the classroom block, with a warm dry Christchurch summer nor’west breeze on my skin, my skin golden brown with my young boy’s downy arm hairs shining like fine translucent golden threads in the sun. In that moment experiencing a very simple and uncomplicated happiness, a happiness that costs nothing and isn’t attached to anything, so you can never feel afraid of losing it.
I think childhood experiences feel that way because as a child you don’t question it, you don’t layer complex narratives onto it, you don’t have an orchestra of grown-up concerns chattering in the background, nipping away at your psyche like sandflies, detracting (and distracting) from the goodness of the moment. As a child you’re more like a dog, able to just smell the roses, to just fucking accept a good moment without resistance, without questioning, without neuroticism, without assigning meaning to it. Without a bunch of pointless thoughts firing off randomly and taking away from the purity of the moment.
One of the most visceral experiences that I ever had in this vein, was on the 133 metre superyacht Al Mirqab as she crossed the Atlantic Ocean, five days away from any land, literally in the middle of nowhere. It was mid-evening, after dinner, and I’d come up top to get some fresh air, and moved forward to the foredeck to get some space away from the crew.
I was lying on my back, under a clear night sky, the breeze warmly caressing my skin, the boat slowly heaving up and down from the long, drawn-out Atlantic swells, which have a far longer period than Mediterranean swells, sixty to ninety seconds apart. I had closed my eyes for a while as I breathed the warm, salty air. My headphones were plugged into my laptop, which was playing some Smashing Pumpkins album – I don’t recall, probably “Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness” or “Siamese Dream”.
And then I opened my eyes. It was a drug-like state of pleasure. The gentle weighting and unweighting of my supine body on the deck perhaps a primal reminder of being rocked to sleep by one’s mother as an infant; visually, a different sensory story being told: a hemispherical dome of stars and moon above me seeming to slowly rock and sway around me and the boat, as though I was fixed in place, the centre of it all. And then in my ears the lush, multi-layered, spatially rich sounds of Billy Corgan’s musical genius. It was such a powerful experience that I felt the need to grab my laptop, open it on my stomach, and open a Notepad app, screen brightness dimmed to zero, deliberately typing blindly in the dark, trying to express in writing how it felt without disconnecting from the experience I was having.
And when it ended, when low clouds interrupted my view, I went back down below deck into the crew area to go to bed, and I knew that there was no way I could share or explain this experience to any of the crew, who’d been below decks the entire time, in a completely different place to me – yet physically only a few metres below the deck I’d been lying on. Bathed in garish artificial light, drinking, bantering, watching movies, oblivious to the incredibly pure, natural, uncomplicated yet powerful experience that I’d just had, my sight, vision, touch and hearing senses being fed beautiful but divergent inputs all at the same time.
As I realised that explaining this to anyone couldn’t possibly do it justice, I felt disappointed, yet also glad; glad that it was my moment, my discovery, like discovering a beautiful cove, or a secret love.
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Wow! Love those moments. Very similar to one I had in Antarctica except that mine was abruptly ended by others who were concerned that I was seeking solitude and worried that I was suicidal!
Do you remember where the old Kotuku school was. We had holidays there, near Lake Brunner.
No I don’t remember that area. I’ve got almost no memories of Okarito either!