I just can’t peel my eyes off the colors. As the sun is setting, the clear blue water of the lake shifts colors, the changing sky reflecting on its surface, painting it in pink and blue hues, like liquid cotton candy.
I’m in love with open water swimming.
“Another hobby, another thing to train for, another distraction,” you might think. Once upon I time, I would have thought that way. Being a scientist, I kept hearing it from all around, that I should specialize, not start over and over and over again on a new topic each time. From biochemistry to evolutionary biology, to medical research to neuroscience – my scientific CV reads like someone brushed a puzzle off a table, the pieces clearly part of the same whole, but you wouldn’t be able to tell if you just threw a passing glance at the mess.
My athletic CV is starting to look similar.
Sometimes I tried. Fought to make myself focus for long times at a stretch work on one thing, and one thing only. But eventually, it would always, always happen again.
I would fall in love with something new.
I used to feel bad about my lack of focus, my tendency to prefer being a Jack-Of-All-Trades rather than a specialist at just one thing.
But I won’t apologize for it anymore. Because the reason why I write these stories and why I will never be able to focus on just one thing stem from the same root:
I love this place. This gods damn magnificent planet. There is so much to see, to learn, to experience that not doing so, locking myself away into a single box of specialization seems almost akin to blasphemy. I will be a beginner, over and over again. And I will love like only an amateur and beginner can, filled with innocent naivety and pure joy at discovering a new puzzle piece.
Who knows? Maybe it’ll even fit into the mosaic I’ve already been working on all this while.
And when I write, that’s the love that I hope, sometimes, maybe just a little, to pass on to you.
This world is a precious place.
And it’s easier to see when you always begin again.
~ Words of a ghostwriting goldfish 🕷🐟🧡