A waltz in the tempest

I'm heading to the outdoor pool in my neighborhood one more time, on a cloudy and dark Tuesday evening. I'm having mixed feelings, anger and frustration appears the most. At one moment I am embracing that secure feeling of being able to go to this swim workout. After all those years of practising, having this luxury to go any pool and attend to a swimming lesson makes me feel grateful. Outside it looks very regular, a routine Tuesday on a boring summer evening. Inside it feels like reaching to a mental welfare state after a long time missing that. By the time I'm entering the pool, I see the dark clouds and I feel that it's going to be a difficult session.

As I enter the water, I immediately start my breathing drill inside the water. It's really cold. Maybe around 16 degrees, maybe even less. I'm doing some warmup and we start practising few drills with the group. As time passes, I don't get used to the temperature because there are sometimes couple of minutes of gaps where the instructor explains the drills. I cannot even focus to the drill because of the water temperature. I'm regretting that I didn't take my wetsuit to the workout. But it's too late and minutes pass by. After half an hour into the lesson, I'm giving up. I'm telling to myself that it's okay. I'm not feeling safe anymore and I won't be able to focus to the session anyways. There's no point of pushing it further when I'm not able concentrate. I'm talking to the instructor and leaving the pool to head back home.

What I like about cold water shocking is that feeling of calmness it brings. I feel like the things I had on my mind before the workout don't matter anymore. It's like having an instant macro perspective. It wakes me up from the unaware states. When I feel anxious or unease, this ritual helps me greatly to forecast internally leading to a quicker recovery.

I'm finding myself jumping into waters that look on dark gray shades on an April afternoon. I know that I am at the edges of my endurance already. However I am holding to that stubborn character to go one more mile without realising the consequences. Instead of sheltering in the presence of this upcoming storm, I am intending to face it without adequate clothing. I think I'm pushing one more time forward because I know that when I'll stop, that's going to be it. I won't be able to get up again. That's how I enroll myself in to become a volunteer for the upcoming elections.

Starting organising with few friends, learning the rules and legislations without knowing what I'm running into. I am setting in my mind a limit that, this is it. After this elections end, I will shut down everything and go into a deep retreat. I know that I can run for couple of more weeks. What I don't realize is that these couple of weeks might end up having an impact of a full marathon on me. Spending more than hundreds of hours offsite and at the election site; the first round of elections is ending by giving me the worst night of my life. I'm having thoughts of life insecurity at times but we are surviving that night thankfully. After having triggering experiences from my past for days and being exposed to a life threatening traumatic event; I'm not stopping there either.

After having a day of disappointment when the results of first round come in, with the warnings from my friends I try to focus to the second round and suppress my feelings. I see my dearest friend preparing already for the second round and I hop on the train. We start working until midnights organizing shifts for 20+ hours of work spreaded across 5 days. At points, I question my whole existence for the things I find myself in. I question that why I find myself in this kind of situations when it's already too late to swim back to the shore. Then I tell myself one motivation sentence, if my kid asks in the future that what I was doing when that election happened; I will say that I did my best with whole my existence and showed up at the front line.

When I get tired in the water, I remember the techniques. How I should push the water back, how I should kick my legs and how to recover my arms. However, I feel so weak and when I turn my head to water in between short breaths, I just see a pitch black.

Then I find myself at a point that I am surrounded by hundreds of people demanding things from me, and there's only one person whom I can trust. We come shoulder to shoulder and try to put off many fires and problems during those five days. However, the number of people we're interacting with is exhausting our moods, encapsulating and manipulating our thinking processes. It's just a inhumane working condition. But at least this round, we accept our vulnerability and ask help from dozens of lawyers, number of psychologists and highly skilled people who can manage stress well. After having a high fever, hallucinative and psychosomatic illnesses, I'm still not giving up and continuing the battle in the capital too. Only to see a devastating result.

I'm expecting a sad emotion but I am not feeling that way. If anything, I feel lighter after the elections finally end. I am thinking about all the effort that we put for the past month, all the personal sacrifices made and everything. Then I am exhaling one more time and trying to forget all of that as if it didn't even happen. I somehow feel that the underlying emotions will come to surface later though. That's how I'm trying to remember how my life looked like before everything started three months ago.

"I’m sorry, but I don’t want to be an emperor. That’s not my business. I don’t want to rule or conquer anyone. I should like to help everyone - if possible - Jew, Gentile - black man - white.

We all want to help one another. Human beings are like that. We want to live by each other’s happiness - not by each other’s misery. We don’t want to hate and despise one another.

In this world there is room for everyone. And the good earth is rich and can provide for everyone. The way of life can be free and beautiful, but we have lost the way."