Swimming and Spiritualism

 I went to Agios Sostis this morning for an early morning swimming lesson. Unfortunately the second beach was covered in litter, mostly from the sea, ( well humans ) I decided to come back later and clear it up. For the swimming lesson I was accompanied by a dog, who loves swimming. She is much better than me, but she taught me a thing or two today. I took it easy getting in the water, waiting for a while for my body to get used to the temperature before going all the way in. It’s a very invigorating experience, even if you can’t swim. I did the floating on my back thing, and then after a while tried moving forward, swimming doggie paddle style. My coordination isn’t too good, I forget sometimes  to use my back legs and start to sink. But I ended up going for longer periods. In the end we left before people appeared, it’s ok to have dogs on a beach , but if free, you can’t expect other people to enjoy four boisterous dogs!

I went down to Livadi, got my friends bread order, in Greek, I was impressed with myself, they knew what I meant, I asked for my friends bread order and three croissants.  ( actually they are easy to order) I took the bread order back and then drove my friends visitor back to Sostis to clean the beach up and then lie in the sun, well under a tree. We picked up the rubbish, chatted to a French visitor who helped us. I took the rest of the rubbish up after the suntan top up. 

I think it’s interesting that because I have more time, my approach to meeting new people has changed. I have more time to talk to them, learn about their lives and beliefs. I am not at all religious, but I sort of feel I understand a lot more about peoples spiritualism, what they think about things, that define our generation, climate change and so on. My friends visitor is quite into Buddhism and has also has given mindfulness courses. They also had an interesting travel experience  when they were quite young. I did give mindfulness a go when I was trying to sort out my anxiety years ago and I have been thinking about it, to help me generally.  But I think the thing that struck me, was even here, I don’t give my mind or body much time to take stock of things, I am either walking, talking, eating, drinking, or on my iPad, watching tv and so on. How many of us follow this path and the only time our bodies and mind get a rest is when we sleep? So after leaving the beach and cleaning the house I did a brief attempt at meditation before going out to have dinner with my friend and their visitor. I found the five minutes or so invigorating, like being in the sea, and it’s something I think I will take up and try to do each day. It’s not difficult, a google search, will probably be a good place to start, but I got a good startup pack from my friends visitor, so thanks to them for showing me the way.

Oh when I got back here, last night the parking was awful again, I was squeezing into a space, so some said to me in Greek that I could park at the top of my track, afterwards my mind finally translated what they had said, but by then it was too late.