It is a twofold activity: breathing is the base, it gives you the rhythm, the pace. It allows you to control how you apply your energy.
Then you need to stay focused on your movements. It is not about where you have to go, which is still important, but how you progress, your target is not external, but inside you. The less you manage to resist to the water, the faster you go. The more your movements are coordinated, the more you feel confident in yourself.
I made a terrible mistake in stopping physical activity. Well, I am re-starting.
As a reading:
I don't know the way I was joined to the body, nor how, at the same time, I can be the image of God and a mixture of mud. In actual fact, even when the body is healty, it hurries me, and presses me violently, causing suffering.
I love the body as a friend, but I hate it as an enemy and an opponent; I try to escape it like a prison, I venerate it as a co-heir. If I try to weaken it, I won't find an ally and a collaborator that I can use in the most eminent challenges, not forgetting that I was created exactly for this reason: to ascend, that is, with my actions, to God.
If, instead, I would behave in a more docile way towards the body, that is as with a collaborator, I would not know how to escape its rebellious violence and to avoid going far from God, under the weight of those restraints which stop me and drag me to the ground.
As an enemy, the body is weak, as a friend it is deceitful. How extraordinary this union and contraddiction is! What I fear, I embrace; what I love I fear greatly. Before fighting it, I reconcile with it; before making peace, I quarrel with that.
What kind of Wisdom is this that I am experiencing? What kind of mystery? Maybe God allows this, so that we, being His ownership and coming from Heaven, while we exhalt ourselves and we become proud because of our dignity, don't despise the Creator, and because of that fight and that enmity that exists between us and the body, never distract our eyes from Him.
Consequently, that infirmity that was joined to us slows down and coerces our dignity so that we can understand that we are great and at the same time despicable, earthly and heavenly, perishable and immortal, heirs of light and fire, or of darkness according to which condition we tend.
This our mixture, as far as I can understand, happens so that given that the image of the divine dignity made proud our souls, the dust, instead, depresses them and curbs them...
But now (...), what has to be done, brothers, is to take care of the body as a relative and a friend. Although, in fact, I accused it as an enemy because of those disturbances that it causes to the soul, nonetheless considering He who established and realised such union, I will have to embrace my body as a friend.
Saint Gregory of Nazianzus - Discourses, XIV, on the love for the poors 6-8.
The translation is mine, from this italian version. Sorry for the mistakes.
