swimming/gravity/anti-gravity

[r4ch3l]

Any of y'all really drawn to swimming as a child or presently? I had a pool when I was a kid and it was my favorite activity outside of reading. Something about being freed from gravity/suspended in the water, drowning (no pun intended) out sensory stimulation while submerged, and also the repetitive/meditative aspect of cruising through the water made me feel deeply happy and relaxed. In high school I was atrocious when it came to competing on the swim and water polo team but I stayed on it because I just enjoyed the time I spent in the pool during practice.

I also loved horse riding and anything involving gravity manipulation, like devil sticks and that diablo contraption.

When I was 20 someone gave me a hula hoop and I got really good at it really fast...then it turned into a side hustle while I was in college when people started hiring me to gogo dance with it at parties. I don't get in the dance studio much anymore but from 21-23 when I made time to spin around just for fun I feel like I was a much more relaxed and happy person.

Yet somehow I still feel extremely awkward when dancing without a hoop.

 

[Alex_]

If you stop to think about it, we are all at the bottom of a giant pool of air; airplanes are just like submarines and parachuting is just slowly sinking.

And yeah, everyone likes pools.

 

[Hayyel]

I enjoy swimming, and I like to just float around in water without a care in the world. Unfortunately that too can get boring after a while, thus the most I can stnd it is about a week of it. I never tried horseriding, tho I always secretly wanted to. I guess the only thing stopping me is that I would not be comfortable with them lugging my weight around. And I never managed to figure out the hula hoop, tho I tried to quite a lot.

 

[Chad]

I love swimming as well. As far as an active sport it by far my favorite activity. Mostly because I hate being hot and sweaty and swimming deal with though annoyances quite well.

 

[Happy]

I can't swim, but I'm a qualified scuba diver. Make sense of that!

 

[Cognisant]

When I was 20 someone gave me a hula hoop and I got really good at it really fast...then it turned into a side hustle while I was in college when people started hiring me to gogo dance with it at parties.

Video?

I can't swim, but I'm a qualified scuba diver. Make sense of that!

I can see how it's technically possible, scuba training starts in shallow water and when you move to the deeper end it's not so you can swim on the surface, though it is perplexing that at some point or another you must have moved through the water so your body must have figured out the swimming motion, have you tried swimming without scuba gear?

Personally I've done a lot of swimming, I grew up seeing how many times I could swim the length of a pool underwater on a single breath, at my fittest I could do the entire length of an Olympic sized swimming pool and back, now I'd be lucky to do a quarter of that, and I've had some experience free diving in salt water, it's simple enough in fresh water but in the sea the water's denser so the pressure seems to build twice as fast, I have to equalise my sinuses after only 2-3 meters, further down than that I can feel the pressure squeezing my ribcage.

 

[Happy]

I can see how it's technically possible, scuba training starts in shallow water and when you move to the deeper end it's not so you can swim on the surface, though it is perplexing that at some point or another you must have moved through the water so your body must have figured out the swimming motion, have you tried swimming without scuba gear?

I had to do a swimming test. It took me almost an hour to doggy paddle the distance, while everyone else took about 5-10 mins. Then I had to tread water for 15 mins. I've never been so exhausted in my life. Then when you actually dive, you control your depth by inflating/deflating your BCD (Buoyancy control device), and you're wearing fins (flippers) which makes manoeuvrability easy. I'd never dive alone though, because if something went wrong, I'd probably drown...

 

[bartoli]

I think Arthur Clarke said that he liked diving, because it's what feels the most like being in space

 

[Double_V]

I'm the mom of two Team USA swimmers. My INFJ son LOVED water from the second he'd taken he was born. He spent hours in the tub. I eventually got a kiddy pool, and then he took swim lessons at the local pool, then summer swim team-there at 5:30 a.m daily (and damn cold to boot). Then they joined the YMCA's team, then the high school teams, then the USA team.

My ISFJ daughter was driven to do it, it was great in that she was always in great condition for any other sport season, and the fly widened out her somewhat narrow shoulders.

But, my INFJ son, for him the water is a need. He's become the assistant coach for the HS team's (along with another INFJ woman) and he is the community pool manager and a swim teacher. Somewhere in all that he also became a hydraulics expert.... and knows everything about anything with a pump in it. Between making a living on things that pump things he's doing things that are about or in water. He takes two 45 minute showers a day and if he was allowed he'd lay in the tub and read for hours. For awhile, when he had his own apartment, he'd learned how to make a pan of potatoes au gratin and balance it the tub's edge so he could eat it while he was reading in the tub.

Without water he becomes an edgey ass. The water just seems to satisify whatever he needs. I've always called him our Water Baby.

My third child is an EXTP, leaning more S than N. He always swam like a fish.... but was completely uninterested in it.

Swimming this much can be very expensive. Several thousands of dollars were spent on swim suits for ISFJ & INFJ each a year. I finally found a major high priced neighborhood church rummage sale that someone was donating new competitive swim suits for for about 2 bucks each. Every year I bought all of them, and donated whatever we were using to the other kids on the teams. And compltely wore out one 36K van doing it..

Anyway, the best things we found about all the swimming was that it works the body and calms the mind, they were always too busy to be in any trouble, and this is the best one. The person the swimmer is competing against is themselves. You work to beat your own personal best.

 

[AnnaC]

I was actually thinking about the gravity aspect of swimming while floating the other day. It's amazing how heavy and sluggish I feel after I get out of the water; as soon as I set my feet out, I want to get back inside the pool.

Anywho, I love swimming. It wipes my mind clean of everything, and it's the one place that I'm able to fully relax every muscle in my body without feeling unsafe.

 

[r4ch3l]

I was actually thinking about the gravity aspect of swimming while floating the other day. It's amazing how heavy and sluggish I feel after I get out of the water; as soon as I set my feet out, I want to get back inside the pool.

Anywho, I love swimming. It wipes my mind clean of everything, and it's the one place that I'm able to fully relax every muscle in my body without feeling unsafe.

Yeah, I think I was curious about asking this bunch because it would seem that the lack of gravity might be particularly comforting to those of us who are not so wild about using our sensing functions and have high Ti. I'm interested in trying out a sensory deprivation/floatation tank because I feel that my experiments with meditating never go very far because I still have to fight gravity. How's that for INTP laziness?

Also the only other person I've known who I am sure is 100% INTP took up free-diving in his early 30s and loves it for anti-gravity and anti-oxygen (!) reasons that he claims help him relax and think. Which reminds me of the creative process of (possibly INTP?) Japanese inventor Yoshiro Nakamatsu.

In his interviews, Nakamatsu described his "creativity process", which includes listening to music and concludes with diving underwater, where he says he comes up with his best ideas and records them while underwater. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yoshiro_Nakamatsu#cite_note-pingmag-9Nakamatsu claims to benefit from lack of oxygen to the brain, making inventions "0.5 seconds before death". He also built a million dollar toilet room made completely out of gold that he claims helps make him think better. Nakamatsu also has an elevator in his house that he claims helps him think better. He strictly denies that it is an elevator, but rather a "vertical moving room". Nakamatsu's goal is to live at least 144 years.

 

[Polaris]

I have always loved swimming. Like Cog, I spent more time under water than above it and used to push myself in the pool, seeing how far I could swim without coming up for air. I would also try to experiment with the amount of air I let into or out of my lungs to see where in the water column that would leave me. And I hate the feeling of getting out of water when your body just feels heavy.

One of my dreams have been to experience the weightlessness training that the astronauts go through; a dirty big jet basically taking a nosedive through the atmosphere with people inside it. Funnily enough, parachuting never appealed to me at all.

On a more tangential note, I read a theory about gravity; that the weightlessness we are experiencing when falling through the sky isn't caused by us falling; we are actually still while everything else is moving upwards towards us....

I think it was in the book "The Fabric of the Universe" by Brian Greene.

A must-read for INTP's....