Wisdom in the T-Shirts: I Swim Therefore I.M.

Dean Ottati is a lifelong competitive swimmer of no real note.  Dean is the author of The Runner and the Path: An Athletes Quest for Meaning in Postmodern Corporate America, and is currently suffering a massive case of  procrastination-through-distraction while his manuscript, Swimming and the Meaning of Life: A Father, A Son,  A Philosophy, and A  Sport, sits alone on the corner of his desk, starving for attention.

I’m sitting it the bleachers at the east end of the pool. It’s about 8:00 AM on a Saturday morning. The air is cool, but the sun is warm. I have a cup of coffee and a newspaper. Fans haven’t filtered in yet, and there is plenty of room such that I can lean back and spread out. In front of me is the organized chaos of churn and splash of 1000 or so swimmers warming up for their races later in the day. I love their energy, and I admire their discipline. These are the kids that have decided to forsake so many transitory desires to more fully dedicate themselves to the absurd pursuit of becoming better, faster swimmers.

As a parent, I’ve come to love this part of the meet almost as much as the racing. The reason is simple. We live in these frenetic, postmodern, multi-tasking, dual-income, picking-up, dropping-off, emotionally hectic, informationally overwhelming, economically challenging, and spiritually bereft times. We have to earn a living, take care of the house, ferry our kids hither and yon, keep up our social life, get some exercise, stay informed about local and world events, volunteer, get the oil changed, pick up the dry cleaning… These things take time and focus and they wear us out. But we are also just plain lazy, filling our days and nights with pointless activity, which is so easy to do when we have such a plethora of attractive, seemingly consequential, but actually quite trivial choices at our disposal, such as television shows, internet chats, and endless links to be clicked. To me, one of the best things about watching swim meets, is the time out from all the busyness, leaving a little space for recharging and for reflection.

Besides being a swim geek, I also love philosophy. To be philosopher means one is a “lover of wisdom,” but just because someone is a lover of wisdom, it does’t mean one is a possessor of wisdom. Especially me. But I do have a theory. It’s this: Even amongst all the busyness and distraction, deep down we are all quite clear about what we want and need in this lifetime, even if we can’t name it, we know that some path toward truth, love, goodness, and wisdom is what is most important. Yet we lose track of this constantly.

So for this reason, I’ve invented a game which combines both my love of swimming and my love of philosophy, and which forces me to slow down and reflect. I call it the T-Shirt game. The aim is simple. It’s to pick out a T-Shirt that someone in the mass of humanity in front of me is wearing, read it, and spend some time contemplating its deeper meaning. It turns out that swimmers have tapped into a rich vein of genuine aphoristic wisdom, and they aren’t afraid to wear their deep thoughts on their sleeves…or their backs…or their fronts… I like to think it’s because swimmers are in touch with who they are. I like this game because simply pondering the nature of wisdom in the midst of the confusion of our hectic and daily lives, nudges us toward the thing itself.

A high school age swimmer walks by. She is smiling, and as she passes, I can make out what is written: “I Swim Therefore IM.”

This is a shirt after my own heart, referring, of course, to the famous (now also infamous) conclusion reached by the great mathematician and philosopher Rene Descartes, “I think therefore I am.” In one short burst, this T-shirt both delivers a fair enough pun (ok, its corny) and neatly ties in the similarity between the essential nature of both philosophy and swimming. Both are a quest for personal improvement. Both are a burning desire to know excellence in a personal way. Both are a way of life.

Descartes was born in 1596, and as a young man he had a strong desire to achieve insight into the nature of man and the universe. After studying philosophy, he became convinced of his own ignorance. He wrote that he was looking for certainty. Certainty – Not blind belief that masquerades as certainty. He was looking for absolute certainty. And from this point of certainty, he wanted to build a lever to move the world.

“Archimedes, that he might transport the entire globe from the place it occupied to another, demanded only a point that was firm and immovable; so, also, I shall be entitled to entertain the highest expectations, if I am fortunate enough to discover only one thing that is certain and indubitable.”

While Descartes, as philosophers go, is not exactly my cup of tea, greatness is greatness. What follows is about as beautiful and inspirational as a philosophical passage can be. To find his single certainty, Descartes is willing to go anywhere in his mind, to think anything. So dedicated to finding the truth, he systematically picks up, examines, and discards absolutely everything that can be doubted, including beliefs that most of us would hold as sacred, self-evident, and obviously true.

Descartes considers and discards all of the books handed down through the ages from the great wisdom traditions. He recognizes that he can be deceived by any perception that comes to him through his senses, and so he discards those too. He examines his feelings, and notes that when he dreams he experiences feelings that are not discernibly different from his waking ones, and so he wonders how he can be certain that his life is but a dream?

Finally, after traversing his thoughts, feelings, and perceptions, and rejecting them all, the only thing left for Descartes to be certain of, the only thing he knew to be true, was that he doubted. And when he doubted, he had to be thinking and because he was thinking, it had to be certain that he was a thinking being. Or as he expressed it: Cogito ergo sum – “I think, therefore I am.”

And after his heroic efforts to clear away absolutely everything that was not essential to find his Archimedean point, Descartes would go about the business of building up the new, offering “proof” of the existence of God, and ultimately building such a good lever that he really did move the entire world, giving birth to the scientific movement. Today he is both revered and reviled for the way he conceived of the mind as separate from matter – i.e. man as separate from nature. But all of that is another story, beyond the wisdom of his initial clearing away of all that was inessential as referenced on the T-Shirt. None of what came after “I think therefore I am” removes any of the initial thrill of reading about Descartes quest for certainty, or of the excitement the reader experiences witnessing the power of the human mind, the force of concentrated attention and purpose…

The meet is about to start, and the stands are starting to fill. There is connection I want to make in today’s version of the T-Shirt game, it has something to do with swimming and philosophy, but I can’t quite put my finger on it.

One of the dads climbs up to sit down next to me as I gather up my belongings to make room. I’ve known him for a long time. Our boys have grown up together, starting out on rival neighborhood summer rec teams, later playing water polo together, and now as year round team mates. Jason has Kevin Costner in Tin Cup good looks, as well as the focus, determination, and drive, typical of the late 40’s tri-athlete that he is. We tease him about his intensity, which he can’t always contain, but what Jason also possesses is a deep and abiding sense of humor about himself. When we first met, I used to try to keep my distance, but now I simply can’t get enough of the guy. I love his passion and energy, and I love being around him.

As the first race is about to get started, Jason says: “One thing about swimming, it’s the truth!”

I know exactly what he means. These kids will stand up on the blocks, nearly naked and alone, with no place to hide. The quality of their performance will for the most part be a reflection of the efforts they put in leading up to this race. There will be no teammates to blame, no fingers to point, no trying to get ahead by letting the air out of someone else’s tires. Their performance will uniquely belong to them. And the stopwatch, as always, will remain an impartial judge.

And then it hits me. The life of a swimmer is like the exercise of Descartes. Both are a search for excellence, and in the service of finding that excellence, it requires a stripping away of that which doesn’t support the aim.

These are the kids that have already demonstrated that they are willing to forgo an instant and often dramatic gratification in favor of delayed and subtle rewards. There probably isn’t one of them that hasn’t given up a party, or a sleep-over, or any number of things “normal” teenagers do in favor of getting themselves to a practice or a meet. These are the kids that have mastered the thousand temptations, to get out of bed five minutes later, to kick less vigorously off the wall the next time, the little easing-offs here and there, which in and of themselves are insignificant, but when taken together ineluctably lead to the ultimate surrender. These are the kids that know in a personal way what all the great sages throughout history have been telling us all along: It’s what you do, every day, day in and day out, that forms who you are. And it shows in these kids.

Physically, the sedentariness that afflicts most of our youth has been replaced by the long accretion of elevated heart beats, of muscle-fiber twitches, of deep breaths that have remade their plumbing, resized their lungs…

Mentally, they’ve spent countless hours focusing on their streamlines, attending to the elimination of small inefficiencies in their strokes, concentrating on the most minute details of hand position etc.. And I have to believe this sustained focus spills over into the other corners of their lives. As a group, it’s certainly reflected in their grades…

Swimming, like philosophy, is an attitude, a way of life. Right now, at this stage in their lives, it is who these kids are.

And of course, I have to throw in one extra passing thought. Since the beginning, philosophers have been interested in the question of excellence in general, human excellence in particular. And what event demonstrates all around human swimming excellence better than the IM?

“I Swim Therefore IM.” There’s a lot of hard earned wisdom and truth in that. It’s a good shirt.