I teach innovation workshops.  Often.  I stand at the front of an auditorium and shake corporate audiences out of their stupor.  I remind the middle-aged that their minds are elastic. If only they chose to stretch them.  I assign homework: drive home a different route; talk to your spouse about a difficult subject; read a religious text that is not your own.

But here, sitting in the lobby of my local swimming pool, I get to call myself out.  Doing something different isn’t enough.  Different can still be in your “I’m-not-terrified” zone.  So I can read the Koran alongside the Book of Mormon and feel intellectually interested.  I take take a trip to Uzbekistan and be intrigued, but be entirely comfortable wandering around a foreign place.  I’m not truly stretching myself in these exercises. So why the local pool? 

I recently signed up for private swim instruction.  This is unnecessary, as I have been able to swim since I was a child.  But my technique is poor.  So I’m starting from scratch (this is all part of a mid-life-self-indulgent-crisis-reinvention exercise).  

So what’s true stretch?  Being the 5’8” 37 year old flailing around in a pool as your 6’1” 24 year old coach gives you instruction.   There’s no place for my ego in this water.  He gets to sit flaccidly pool-side and watch my awkward, uncomfortable, humiliation. 

But every 3 strokes of 100, I hit my stride.  And I can feel the synapses in my brain fire-up and my brain start to pulse.  It’s worth every rose tint of embarrassment.

-SW