Tyler Knott Gregson: Untitled

Tyler Knott Gregson is someone who I discovered through Tumblr by seeing one of his love poems. The vast majority of his poems are love poems and the sad, lonely hearts of Tumblr love him all the more for it. As someone who wouldn't necessarily call love poems their thing I can't deny that his stuff on love really is truly fantastic. Tyler Knott Gregson is someone who deeply understands love in all of its forms, and I would highly reccommend any of his works, although forewarning that you will have intense feelings of all kinds. A lot of time my breath catches in my throat reading some of his stuff, not going to lie. 

Sam and I are discussing doing a week of just love poems, and if that's the case then you'll probably see him again from me, but I don't really want to talk about love at the moment, I think.

I like this poem but I'm not sure if I completely understand it. What exactly is the swimming supposed to be? As previously stated a lot of his stuff is about love, so swimming could be falling in love, except then what does that make the treading water? If the treading water is living life, just getting by, then what exactly does that make the swimming? 

Something about the swimming is taking risks, I feel like I know that much, especially given the "trying to keep your head above the water" line. There's trying to float and then there's keeping your head above water- the latter definitely has the anxious connotation of trying not to drown. There's a sense of danger there that's kind of carried over to the swimming part. 

And swimming is kind of dangerous, especially with how terrifying drowning would be. My mom's deathly afraid of water- has never gone swimming, never been in the ocean, can be in a pool, but not comfortably and especially not at a point where she can't stand with plenty of room between her head and the water. I used to be thankful I didn't inherit that, except now that I don't swim all that much and I need to learn how to drive and probably have her driving anxiety, I think I've changed my mind. It comes up fairly often in Would You Rather stuff if you'd rather drown or be burned alive, and I always choose being burned alive. I've had people tell me that burning would be so much more painful and so much worse and you'd be watching your flesh melt but at the same time, drowning just seems terrible. I don't have my Mom's fear of the water, but I can appreciate the sheer terror of drowning.

(In my opinion the worst way to die is Death by Molasses, by the way. It's like drowning except worse, because molasses.)

Yet we shouldn't forget how much we love to swim. Swimming is a risk of not swallowing water or knocking yourself unconscious or a million other things that can go wrong when you're underwater, but it's a freeing experience of propelling yourself and cutting through liquid and floating and it's something that we should keep doing. Whatever swimming is supposed to represent here, our lives should still have a measure of risk in it. There's something comparable between the feeling of zipping across a pool underwater and the feeling of taking risks. In Brave New World the Savage complains of no love, no hurt, and how are these people living with no risk? Mustafa Mond calmly explains that monthly or so citizens have their blood flushed with endorphins and adrenaline and then flushed out, and they merrily go about their lives. They realized that the sense of risk was necessary, but took care of it in other ways.

So may we never forget how much we truly love to swim or to take risks, for that matter.