I'm trying to write an inspirational story. It is based on a recent experience of mine. I stole my theme from Osho. The heading of his one beautiful article was "If you swim, you miss". I twisted the title to match my topic.
I have been trying to learn swimming at least for past 7 years. I made several attempts from time to time. Each time I started with much enthusiasm and tried hard to learn the basics during the first few days. However, I hardly made any progress beyond floating in the water and drifting couple of meters as long as I could hold one breadth. I thought that swimming is not my thing and there's something terribly wrong in my body which hinders me from becoming a swimmer. This thought lead me to give up every time.
However, many incidents compelled me to give another try to learn it. Whenever I got into a swimming pool, may be after a pool side party or in a hotel during a trip, I had to keep my self in the shallow end standing on the pool like a kid which posed me in utter disgrace. Last year I bought a new swimming pool membership and thought to me, "This time you are either going to learn swimming or drown in the pool and die". This time I made a change; I got the help of a professional trainer.
I started with the same desperate condition. However, my coach gave me the most important advice in learning swimming: "Don't expect progressive results and never give up". This meant that I should not be discouraged if I do not see any progress within days of training. I asked him how long should I be trying to become a swimmer with basic skills. He said "about 30 days". At that point I realized why I was not successful in my previous attempts. In any of those attempts I did not try even closer to 30 days.
Having received the correct advices I started training with a huge will power. I did not care whether people laugh at me or whether I look ridiculous making lot of sounds and drinking pool water. I believed that there should be a light in the end of the tunnel. Even in the twentieth day of my training I did not perform much better than my first day's workout. However, my coach was correct!! When it came close to thirty days...suddenly and totally unexpectedly...I could swim a good length while performing all the basics well. I could not believe it for a moment. It was one of my happiest days in that year. After all those years of struggling I became a swimmer.
It is interesting to note that many changes in the human body take place in leaps but not as ramps. Many people misread this behavior as unresponsiveness. A medical book I recently read, "The secrets of miracle doctors", suggests that this fact is true for many health aspects. What you need to do is keep making small quantitative changes even if you don't see any response. Those small changes add up and trigger a significant qualitative change somewhere down the line. It might be an amazing coincidence that Marx and Engels say that "Continuous quantitative changes lead to sudden qualitative changes in the society". This might be what keeps the agitation of courageous socialist leaders even when they get almost no response from the society.
Learning swimming inspired me to try out the same strategy in other things too. Even if none of them works, I'm a happy regular swimmer now.
