Sitting at the bottom of the swimming pool

When I was a child, I read this somewhere in a magazine: I forget where, or I'd send the writer my thanks. It's one of those offhand things which become part of my mental furniture for the rest of my life.

The writer said that when she was a little girl, she used to go with her friends to the swimming pool. And her friends would end up splashing around and making a lot of noise, which is fun for a while. When she got tired of it, though, she would take a great lungful of air and make herself sink to the bottom of the pool, and there she would sit happily beneath it all in the calm, looking up at the sunlight and the chaos above her, beneath it but not part of it.

And one day she learned that she could do the same thing anywhere. No swimming pool was necessary.