There’s something oddly comforting about swimming alone. The rest of the day, I exist in fragments — in tabs, in messages, in conversations that start mid-thought and end mid-scroll. But in the pool, the world reduces itself to rhythm and sound: the soft clap of water, the echo of breath, the neat order of the tiles below.

Twice a week, I finish a morning shift and have a two-hour gap before my afternoon lecture. It’s always the same routine: rush from work to the pool, then from the pool to campus — hair damp, bag heavier, brain lighter. It should feel frantic, but it doesn’t. Somewhere between the chlorine and the cold air, there’s a moment that feels like breathing again. Those two hours have become a kind of reset: a quiet middle ground between responsibility and study, where I’m not needed by anyone and don’t have to perform being clever or kind. I just move, breathe, exist.

It’s not a place for thinking, exactly, but for sorting. Ideas that felt jagged on land seem to soften once submerged. The problem is, swimming also makes me hyper-aware of how ridiculous humans are — flailing mammals pretending to be sleek creatures of the sea. No matter how graceful I feel mid-length, there’s always the sight of my reflection in the changing-room mirror after: goggles pressed into my face, hair doing something tragic, and a faint red line across my forehead like a badge of misplaced effort.

Still, I go. Partly for exercise, partly because there’s a kind of thinking that can only happen while doing something repetitive — something that gives your brain permission to wander.

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The Goldfish Bowl

Swimming pools are strange little worlds. Every session feels like entering an ecosystem with its own hierarchies: the fast-lane triathletes with their impeccable technique, slow-lane retirees with floral swim caps and unstoppable stamina, the rest of us trying not to make eye contact with anyone. I float somewhere in the middle — not fast enough to be competitive, not relaxed enough to be graceful.

Sometimes, between laps, I watch the reflections on the water’s surface. The light bends everything: faces, limbs, the clock on the far wall. You can’t tell what’s above or below; it all shimmers into one blurred movement. And for a moment, it feels like what university life often does — suspended, uncertain, beautiful in its distortion.

Being a student is a lot like swimming in a goldfish bowl. You keep looping through the same space, convinced you’re making progress, while outside, the world moves on without you. The deadlines, the lectures, the group projects — they fill the weeks so completely that it’s easy to forget life exists beyond the glass.

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Thinking in Motion

I’ve started to time my swims by essays. Twenty lengths for an argument that isn’t working. Ten more for an opening paragraph. Somewhere around forty, I usually find the sentence I was missing — not because I’m thinking about it directly, but because the repetition clears space for it to surface. There’s a comfort in that rhythm: push off, glide, breathe, repeat. It’s one of the few places where my mind genuinely switches off, where I’m not juggling ideas or notifications or lists — just the simple fact of movement and air.

I used to swim mostly in the 25-metre pool — what I call the goldfish bowl — small, crowded, impossible to forget that people are watching. But now, I prefer the 50-metre stretch at the university’s main pool. There’s a luxury in distance, in having enough space to find your rhythm without colliding with anyone. It feels more like an open thought than a confined one, each length long enough to breathe differently, to think slower.

There’s something to be said for allowing your mind to drift. We’re taught to chase productivity, to fill every gap with work or purpose, but the best thoughts arrive when you stop chasing. In the pool, the only goal is to reach the end and turn back again. Somewhere in that back-and-forth, ideas begin to rearrange themselves.

I sometimes wonder if this is what monks felt in medieval scriptoria: the slow rhythm of copying and breathing, the repetitive motion turning into meditation. There’s something monastic about swimming too — the solitude, the silence, the focus on form. The difference is that monks probably didn’t have to dodge people doing backstroke at unusual angles.

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Bodies and Belonging

Public pools are also unavoidably political. They’re spaces where every kind of body shows up — confident, self-conscious, tentative. You can’t scroll past or filter anything; you’re just there, moving alongside other humans in various stages of vulnerability.

I’ve always thought there’s something feminist about swimming. It asks for strength, not smallness. It’s not about how you look but what your body can do — how it cuts through water, how it endures. But still, that self-awareness seeps in. Even underwater, there’s a flicker of comparison: Am I taking up too much space? Am I visible for the wrong reasons?

The truth is, water equalises more than it divides. Once submerged, everyone looks slightly ridiculous — goggles askew, expressions warped. The perfection dissolves, and what’s left are people trying their best to stay afloat. It’s humbling, in the nicest way.

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The Distance Between Two Worlds

After swimming, walking back to campus always feels like stepping between realities. The pool is humid, enclosed, rhythmic; the outside world hits with cold air and the sound of buses. It’s a shift from one kind of thinking to another — from movement to theory, from the physical to the abstract.

In those in-between moments, I often realise how separate those worlds feel. In lectures, we talk about networks, empires, revolutions — the vast sweep of history. In the pool, the scale collapses back to breath and heartbeat. Both matter. One reminds me of the structures that shape life; the other reminds me that I’m a body moving through them.

Maybe that’s what I love about swimming between lectures. It resets perspective. It reminds me that the humanities are not just about texts and timelines — they’re about people trying to keep their heads above water, literally and otherwise.

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Shifting Lanes

I’ve realised the lanes are never really about speed — they’re about perception. I swim a fairly consistent thirty-five-second length, but depending on who else turns up that day, I can belong to the fast, the medium, or, occasionally, the slow lane. It’s funny how arbitrary those labels feel when you’re in the middle of them — one day you’re the blur overtaking everyone, the next you’re the obstacle someone sighs behind.

There’s something revealing about that. The lanes shift depending on context, not ability, and it’s not so different from academia. Some rooms make you feel quick and capable; others make you question if you’re even moving at all. It depends entirely on who else is in the water.

I’ve stopped trying to take the labels too seriously. What matters is finding rhythm — that feeling of effort and flow aligning, even briefly. The same goes for thinking and writing: the pace doesn’t define the depth.

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Surface

When I finish a swim, I always float — or rather, cling to the edge — for a minute before getting out. There’s a soft hum under the water, a kind of quiet that presses gently against your ears. The world above becomes muted and far away, as if it’s been temporarily paused. It’s one of the few places where I can feel completely alone but not lonely, suspended between motion and stillness. The tiles are cool beneath my hands, the water still rippling from the last push, and for a few seconds everything feels held — contained, but calm.

Writing, at its best, feels a bit like that too. It’s an act of surfacing — of coming up for air after being submerged in thought, of trying to translate the blur of experience into something solid and clear. Both require rhythm and patience: you move through uncertainty until something clicks, and suddenly you can see again.

The pool, the lecture hall, the walk between them — they’re all parts of the same rhythm. Work and rest, noise and quiet, body and thought. They each ask for different forms of attention, but all lead to the same thing: a reminder that thinking doesn’t only happen in your head. It happens in your breath, your body, your repetition.

Maybe that’s what these “lengths between lectures” are for. They’re the distance you need to remember you’re not just a mind chasing deadlines, but a person moving through the world. Thinking, breathing, noticing. The small moments where you pause, look up, and realise that despite everything — the noise, the speed, the pressure — you’re still moving. Still here.