- When another woman and I realized we both loved swimming, we began a ritual.
- After yoga class we swim 500 meters down a river, and it feels almost spiritual.
"Like I always say: You never regret a swim."
My friend Jacquie is climbing the ladder in front of me, beads of water dripping from the ends of her silver hair. She reaches for a pink pair of Crocs and slips them on — she says the soles of her feet are too tender for the ladder rungs.
Earlier that morning I'd taught yoga in the meadow behind our village pub, as I do every Wednesday from April to October. Afterward, Jacquie, the other women who attended my class, and I drank coffee in the pub garden. One by one the others excused themselves to get back to work or go home to clean up before their kids finished school.
Then Jacquie and I put our yoga mats in our cars and walked down to the edge of the river, where we slid off our yoga pants and T-shirts to reveal our swimsuits. We shoved our clothes into our matching neon-orange dry bags, clipped their bands around our waists, and slid into the cool water.
Our swimming ritual continued for 3 years
We've been doing this for three years now, since I started teaching yoga outdoors in 2021, just as England was opening back up after our original COVID-19 lockdown.
I knew Jacquie's daughter from the school gates. For years Jacquie was just "Bryony's mom," a woman in her 70s I sometimes said hello to. Then she started coming to my class. After talking about how much we both love swimming, we decided one week we'd end class with a 500-meter paddle downstream to the jetty at the bottom of her own garden.
The first summer we swam, I was in my late 30s and had just left the church I'd been part of for 10 years. Raised a preacher's daughter in the American South, I was taking apart decades of religious beliefs and finding a new faith I could live with as an adult. Jacquie, a farmer's daughter from Zimbabwe, had become a student of Buddhism in her early 50s after a breast-cancer diagnosis.
As we'd drift down the river, we'd take turns pointing out the sound of wind blowing through the willow trees lining the banks or the herons and kingfishers swooping over our heads. Sometimes we'd end up in hysterics, laughing at how stupid we were for swimming in water so cold or at the chain-link fence one house erected that summer to keep the teenagers who use the river from trespassing.
In awe of the nature around us and moved by our shared bravery, I started to see our swims as spiritual experiences.
Our swims and our friendships have become sacred to me
I'm 41 now; Jacquie is 77. I have two young sons; she has an adult daughter. A few of my friends are getting divorced; many of Jacquie's friends have died. I'm noticing my first wrinkles; Jacquie says that that ship has sailed and that the face you have after 40 is the face you deserve.
That sense of wonder we experienced the first summer we swam hasn't worn off. I still see our swims as sacred experiences, and I feel lucky to have a friend who's older, wiser, and so different from me, who's helped give me a new perspective from which to see the world and reminded me that aging is a privilege.
Thanks to her — for the rest of my life, wherever I am — I'll always remember this: You never regret a swim.