A Year Less Ordinary

I’m struck by the words of Susan Sontag when I think about New Year. “I want to make a New Year’s prayer,” she wrote, “not a resolution. I’m praying for courage.” Sometimes we need courage more than we need resolution when it comes to facing the year ahead.

Standing on the quay in Copenhagen harbour at the start of my year of swimming, I was praying for courage too. The water was cold, glassy-looking, the sun a pale buttery yellow, trying to break through the grey clouds. I’d come to the water because I wasn’t really sure what else to do. I was drowning, in work and in life, and I needed something to rescue me. Somehow I thought that I would find it in the water.

Copenhagen is routinely held up as an example of life done well. It’s considered one of the world’s top cities for work-life balance and one of the happiest cities in the world. I couldn’t understand why I was failing so badly at living in it. I’d been living there for four years and I wasn’t happy and balanced at all. I went to bed with a sense of dread about the workday ahead; I felt trapped, like a battery hen, in a cage of an office where I never got to feel fresh air on my skin and barely had time to breathe. I felt strongly that this was not how life was supposed to be.

Waking at 3am and unable to get back to sleep, I’d sit on my balcony for hours, watching  and listening to the inky water as it rippled in the harbour. In the dark, it looked like oil; it looked alive; it reflected the street lights in strange wavy lines and it stilled, midway through the night, as the tide slackened. I woke so often in the night that I got to know its rhythms and habits like they were my own.

I realised that this was not normal, that I shouldn’t be so stressed that I couldn’t sleep, and that something had to be done. So I quit my job thinking that anything would be better than this, even being jobless in one of the most expensive cities in the world.

I found a temporary part-time job and trod water for a while as I turned the idea over in my mind: what would a good life for me look like? How could I find it or create it? I settled on a simple idea: I would spend a year doing things I wanted to do, things that made me feel alive. To steal a phrase by writer Oliver Burkeman, in this year I would ‘navigate by aliveness’: I’d do things that made me feel alive. I narrowed it down to three specific activities: meeting new people, travelling in Scandinavia and swimming outdoors once a week.

I found that, unexpectedly, this three-pronged approach worked exceptionally well in combination. In my four years living in Copenhagen, I hadn’t made as many Danish friends as I had hoped I would, but that all changed when I started swimming. Introducing this hobby suddenly opened doors to all kinds of people I would never have met. I reached out to them on Instagram and introduced myself and my mission, and suddenly I had people to swim with, in locations across the region. It was a way to achieve the three-fold goal in one go.

I think it worked because Scandinavians are a people of the sea. As Brits, we are too, but in the UK, we can see the sea surrounding our islands as a barrier, a blue ring that separates us and keeps us apart. I see it differently from the other side of the North Sea: the Scandinavian communities have for thousands of years used the sea as a trade route, a larder, and a workplace. It lies between their three nations now, but back in time, they were the same country, ruled by the same kings, and in those times, the sea was part of the country, not a border. They still see the sea as something that connects them rather than separates them: a road, not a barrier, a passage to somewhere else, and a shared space that they all own. Perhaps it’s also because these nations have grown up from small fishing villages along rocky coasts and on isolated islands: connection is essential if you want to survive.

I found myself with a view of the blue nearly every time I travelled in Scandinavia, with a swimming culture to dive into that ran alongside it. Sauna boats were starting to become popular all over Norway, so I joined people in hot floating wooden huts, sweating it out before climbing down a cold metal ladder into the frigid, salty sea. I climbed ladders on quaysides, ran along piers stretching out into cold Arctic seas, dipped in floating swimming pools where you’re protected from boat traffic, and wallowed in ancient hot springs where people have bathed for a thousand years.

In Sweden, a law enshrines the right to roam wherever you are in the countryside. It’s the embodiment of an attitude in this part of the world: you have a right to experience and enjoy nature. You don’t have to ask permission. Swimmers and dippers all over the Nordic region are unconsciously embracing that feeling: this blue space exists for you and your enjoyment, no permission needed. I wish we could all feel like that.

Over my year of swimming in Scandinavia, the water became a metaphor for connection. It was a shared place where I could connect with the Scandinavians around me. It was also a connection point with nature, the chance to feel part of something bigger than myself. Just as the North Sea connects the shingle beaches in Suffolk where I used to swim with my granny with the urban swimming zones where I was dipping with my new friends, it connected me to myself again. Work stress had flattened me out and cold water swimming had revived me. It was as simple as that.

I did not intend to write a book about it. I remembered meeting the poet Claire Williams in Bristol a long time ago, and hearing about how she teaches creative writing as therapy. At my lowest ebb, I felt that just writing about how I was feeling might help me make sense of it, as a private kind of therapy. I kept notes on my iPhone from wherever I was, a kind of scientific log to start with, where I tried out different experiments and reported on whether they made me feel better. I wrote about everywhere I swam and how it felt; I wrote about what I was learning along the way. And in the end, I had this thought that if I wrote it all down in a longer form, maybe someone who was feeling like I had been feeling, right at the beginning when I was so stressed I couldn’t sleep, might be able to find something in it to help them too.

This swimming diary started to tell the story of my recovery from burnout and a growth in optimism and delight in the world. I took notes about what it felt like to swim with a mermaid at the beach in Copenhagen – in brief, like I was in a fairytale, seeing her hair rippling in the current next to the kelp far below me and her orange tail pulse above the sand – and what it was like to get overheated in a sauna in Arctic Norway and nearly pass out. I detailed the skin-zinging feeling I got from swimming naked in the sea in Sweden, and from dipping in a dark harbour in Bergen. I started to write about the scenery around me, the things that other swimmers told me about how they looked at the world and their own swimming practices, and I started to build a story about what swimming in this part of the world looks like and why it’s important.

Halfway through the year, I looked back at the notes I’d written at the start and I was amazed. I was also shocked: I felt sorry for this poor, sad person who had been trapped in an office having a miserable time, doing a job that really wasn’t a good fit. I was astonished at how much things had changed. Something happens when you compound all these things. Swimming in a cold harbour in winter once is an achievement for a cowardly person like me. But doing it multiple times, inducting other friends into the pursuit, joining crowds of people doing it? It was all such a long step from where I had begun.

The more I swam, the more I noticed things. The more I swam, the more I talked to other swimmers about swimming and the more fun that became. The more I swam, the braver I got, and the better my life became, because I was able to make better, braver decisions about what I really wanted to do. It’s a virtuous circle, choosing to do things that make you feel alive. It doubles and triples and becomes a kind of energy that powers your life.

So my challenge to you at the start of this new year is: how could you choose a life powered by things that make you feel alive? You’ve only got one life. What happens if you start really living it? Maybe a year of swimming outdoors once a week would be just the thing to get you started.