♫ Rowing Is My Only Medication — Wishing My Condition Ain't Ever Gonna Go Away ♫

Adapted from a line in the Zac Brown Band song "Knee Deep."

Most people, when they picture someone meditating, picture a person sitting cross-legged on the floor trying — and failing — to think about nothing.

This past Wednesday and Thursday at practice I rowed my single (1x). Conditions were ideal — flat water, little to no wind, hardly any traffic on the water or at the rowing center in general. Just me and my boat. Very peaceful.

Rowing can be meditative — connecting, restoring, clarifying. Meditation isn't thinking about nothing; it's not getting emotionally tangled up in the thoughts passing through your mind at the time. Rowing gives your mind something to focus on: staying balanced, working to blend the four phases of a stroke into one seamless movement — poetry in motion — all in service of propelling the boat down the course with maximum efficiency. Mental then physical, you can lose yourself and find yourself at the same time. To quote another line from the song… "and when you lose yourself you find the key to paradise."

And when you lose yourself you find the key to paradise.

Thankfully, those moments are fleeting. Something — a bad stroke, your blade clipping a lane marker buoy — will break the meditation before too long. Wednesday my blade hit either a turtle or a gator. It was the hardest strike I've ever felt, and at first I thought it was a lane buoy, but when I looked, my blade was ten feet from the nearest marker.

I've been in that state before and paid for it — rowing straight into the shore at the end of the course, and another time into a brick retaining wall in the canal we take back from the 2k course. That one I hit so hard it knocked me clean off my seat.

But in those moments you get a taste of the bliss in Sisyphus's eternal struggle pushing the rock up the hill — the focus on a single pursuit, the joy of effort for effort's sake. And let's be honest, in today's world one of the most limiting things is the endless supply of distractions pulling us away from the task at hand. Multitasking is a fallacy — it's just a way to do many things poorly. Rowing is a way to eliminate all distractions, at least for a few solitary, peaceful moments.

Rowing is Life.