DUMBING IT DOWN

Chapter 13

Earning a Living Instead of Living a Life

The odd thing about the Boorowa Swimming Pool in early January was that it could still feel cold. That may offend the national mythology of the Australian summer, where every pool is meant to sparkle under a merciless sun while children turn red and parents pretend shade cloth is a complete medical strategy. But I remember standing there fully dressed, teaching children to swim, feeling the chill come off the water as if the pool had not received the memo about the season. The concrete around the pool might have been warm enough, and there was probably all the usual noise of children, parents, towels, whistles and the kiosk doing what damage it could do with chips and ice blocks, but the water itself still carried that little country bite.

I was not in swimmers, which says something about either my professionalism or my reluctance to commit fully to the task. I was there for a fortnight over the Christmas break as a swimming instructor, though apparently I had decided that instruction could be delivered from the safety of dry fabric. There was nothing especially heroic about that, and it probably said more about my practical priorities than any deep philosophy about aquatic education. I was qualified to teach children to swim, but I had not yet learned that sometimes the appearance of readiness mattered almost as much as the actual ability to do the job.

One of the youngsters was on a step near the deeper water, doing what small children have done since the beginning of swimming lessons, which is treating boundaries as interesting suggestions rather than firm instructions. He slipped forward and went under, suddenly beyond his depth, with his arms briefly doing that confused underwater argument children have with gravity. He was not down for long, but he was down long enough for the moment to sharpen and for the practical part of my mind to make a decision before the more theatrical part had time to get its boots on. I was close enough to reach him, and that was the fact that mattered to me in the instant before anybody else had time to decide what the incident should mean.

I could have jumped in, and no doubt that would have looked better. In a more flattering version of the story I might have launched myself across the water like a Bondi lifesaver with a whistle, a suntan and a sense of national purpose. Instead, I leaned down, grabbed him by the hair, and returned him to the step with the efficiency of a bloke retrieving a dropped hat from a creek before it floated too far away. It was not elegant, it was not warm, and it was not the sort of rescue that would have featured on a training poster, but it had the considerable advantage of working.

The boy was fine, and in fact he was more than fine in the way small children can be before adults explain to them that they should not be. He coughed, blinked, seemed to accept that the world had briefly gone wet and wrong, and then appeared perfectly happy to continue learning. To him, at least for those first few seconds, being plucked from the water by the hair was simply part of the curriculum, perhaps not ideal but not worth interrupting the morning over. Children can be wonderfully unsentimental about practical solutions when they have not yet been taught the approved emotional response.

His mother saw it from some distance away, and that changed everything. Until then, the incident had belonged to the boy and me, and between us it had been dealt with in the rough, practical manner available at the time. Once his mother arrived, the air shifted, not because she was wrong to be concerned, but because concern has a way of making everybody reconsider the meaning of what has just happened. I do not remember her exact words, and memory is probably being kind to me there, but I remember the movement towards us, the look on her face, and the sudden inspection of a child who only moments earlier had been ready to keep going.

The boy seemed to change because she changed. A moment earlier he had accepted my version of events, which was fairly simple: you slipped, I grabbed you, you are back on the step, and now we continue. Then his mother arrived with fear in her body, and the incident took on a different shape in his mind. The pool, or at least the adults around it, had told him he had not merely been helped back onto a step; he had been rescued from danger, and that danger now required a more serious expression.

That stayed with me, partly because it was funny in the uncomfortable way life often is. I had saved the boy from deeper water, but I had also saved myself from getting wet, and there is no point pretending otherwise. There was a neat little summary of my emerging adult life in that action: do what is necessary, avoid the unnecessary discomfort if possible, and hope no one arrives from a distance to reclassify the whole thing as evidence of a character flaw. I can smile at it now, but even the smile has a small edge on it because the incident became one of those little memories that carried more weight than it seemed entitled to carry.

The logic of it was simple enough, at least to my mind. A child had slipped from a step into water over his head, I was close enough to reach him, and the quickest safe solution was to grab what was available and return him to where he could breathe. The water did not require a speech, the child did not require a ceremony, and the problem did not become more nobly solved because I had sacrificed my dry clothes to the cause. In the order of events as I understood them, danger had appeared, action had followed, safety had been restored, and the matter should have been allowed to settle there.

But logic is only one language, and I was already learning that it was not always the language the room wanted spoken first. The mother saw danger, not efficiency, and she arrived carrying the emotion of what might have happened rather than the evidence of what had actually occurred. She had not been standing beside the child when he slipped, so her mind had to fill the gap between seeing him under the water and seeing him back on the step. In that gap, imagination did what imagination does under stress, turning the possible into the almost certain and the almost certain into a private catastrophe narrowly avoided.

I can understand that now, even if I did not understand it generously then. To her, I may not have looked like a young instructor who had acted quickly and practically; I may have looked like someone who had not shown enough fear. That may have been the deeper offence, not that I had failed to save the child, because I had saved him, but that I had failed to look as frightened as she felt. My response had been too quick, too dry, too economical and too short of visible emotion, which meant it was open to being read as casualness.

That is where the conflict began to show itself in a form I would later know too well. My mind went first to the structure of the problem, the available options, the shortest safe path and the result. Other people often read the same moment through feeling, reassurance, appearance, tone and whether the response seemed to honour the emotional weight they had attached to the event. Neither view was entirely wrong, which made the whole thing more difficult than a simple argument between sense and nonsense.

The intellect, or at least the version of it I had developed by then, wanted the facts placed in order. A child was in water, an instructor was within reach, retrieval by hair was available, the child was safe, and the lesson could continue with closer supervision. That sequence satisfied the practical mind because it accounted for risk, action and result. It did not waste time decorating the incident with feeling, because feeling did not add anything to the rescue once the boy was breathing and standing where he should have been.

The emotional view began somewhere else. It began with the mother’s body seeing her child disappear under water, even briefly, and reacting before thought had arranged itself into neat little columns. It began with the ancient animal terror of losing sight of a child, with all the pictures that can flash through a parent’s mind in less time than it takes to cross a pool enclosure. By the time she reached us, she was not responding only to the boy who had been returned safely to the step; she was responding to the boy she had imagined not being returned at all.

The child himself was caught between those meanings. A moment earlier he had accepted the calm of the person who had fixed the problem, but then he was confronted by the fear of the person who loved him most. No one asked him to choose between those versions of the event, but children are always learning from the emotional weather of adults. The facts had not changed, yet his understanding of the facts had been altered by the face that arrived to interpret them for him.

That is a powerful thing to watch, even in a small incident. The boy had been safe before his mother arrived and safe after she arrived, yet the meaning of the incident changed so completely that his own response changed with it. People do not live inside facts alone, which has taken me a long time to accept without irritation. They live inside the meanings carried to them by the faces, voices and reactions of other people, and those meanings can feel more real than the event itself.

For me, the frustration sat in that difference between the event and the interpretation. I had acted correctly enough for the practical outcome, but not correctly enough for the emotional theatre around the outcome. I use the word theatre carefully, not to mock the mother or diminish her fear, but because life often requires a performance of concern as well as the substance of concern. I had supplied the substance, or so I believed, but I had not supplied the performance in a form that made others comfortable.

That would become one of the great stressors of my life, though of course I could not have known it beside the Boorowa pool. Again and again, I would find myself seeing the wall early, naming the wall, warning about the wall, or trying to move people before they hit the wall, only to discover that the room was more concerned with how I had spoken about the wall than with the fact that the wall was standing there in plain sight. I would learn that being right about the danger did not protect me from being judged for the tone of the warning. I would also learn, less comfortably, that my impatience with the room’s reaction could sometimes make the warning harder to hear than it needed to be.

It is exhausting when your mind is built to resolve the practical problem but the world keeps adding a second problem of perception. The first problem may be tax, work, business, family, money, risk, timing, a client’s mess, a decision avoided, or a child in water. The second problem is always some version of whether the people around you can bear the way you have seen it, said it, acted on it, or failed to decorate it with the emotion they expected. Over time, the second problem becomes heavier than the first because it is never finished.

That is where dumbing it down began to acquire its sharper edge. It was not simply about using easier words or shorter explanations, though there would be plenty of that later. It was about learning to translate urgency into something less offensive, insight into something less confronting, and action into something that looked sufficiently caring to people who had not yet arrived at the problem. It was about editing not only the thought but the manner in which the thought was allowed to appear.

The cruel part is that this kind of editing can make a person look more patient than he feels. It can make him seem measured, diplomatic, sensible and calm, while inside he is privately bouncing his head against the brick wall because the answer is not hidden from him. He can see the practical path, but he must slow down and walk others towards it as if the path has only just emerged. If he moves too quickly, he is arrogant; if he speaks too plainly, he is harsh; if he acts too efficiently, he is cold.

That is what I did not yet understand as a young swimming instructor standing dry beside the pool. I thought the issue was whether I had done the right thing, and in the narrow practical sense I had. The larger issue was whether I had done the right thing in a way that satisfied the emotional requirements of those watching, and that was a much more complicated standard. It was a standard that shifted depending on the room, the person, the fear, the hierarchy, the history and the amount of embarrassment everyone needed to avoid.

I did not naturally trust that standard because it seemed too often to punish clarity. It asked the person who saw the problem to manage not only the problem but everyone else’s feelings about the problem, and to do so without appearing irritated by the delay. That may be a reasonable social expectation in some circumstances, and I am not pretending I was exempt from the need to show care. But when repeated across years it becomes more than manners; it becomes labour, invisible and unpaid, performed by the person already carrying the burden of recognition.

The mother, in that moment, was not thinking about any of that. She was thinking about her child, and fair enough too. But I was beginning to learn that the mind which solves a problem quickly can still become the accused party if its speed deprives others of the emotional process they expect. The intellect can look like indifference when it does not pause long enough to display fear, and perception can become more persuasive than outcome when people need to feel that their alarm has been properly acknowledged.

There was no great drama after it, at least not one I remember. No one was carried away, no inquiry was held, and I was not marched from the Boorowa Swimming Pool in disgrace for committing follicular rescue without prior written approval. The day went on, as days do, smoothing over the sharp little lessons hidden inside them. But somewhere in me, the incident joined the growing file of moments where the facts were not enough, the outcome was not enough, and the room’s perception had become a separate force to be survived.

That force would wear me down over time. Not because other people had emotions, because of course they did, and I had plenty of my own even when they arrived in less socially useful forms. It wore me down because I kept discovering that my responsibility did not end with seeing clearly or acting usefully. I also had to soften the sight, package the action, absorb the reaction, and pretend the delay was not grinding away at me from the inside.

I was not yet someone with a plan. I had left school with the HSC result sitting behind me like a public notice, and the question of what came next had not opened into anything noble or beautifully lit. It had narrowed almost immediately into work, money, movement and whatever practical opportunity appeared in front of me without requiring too much explanation of who I was supposed to become. I had stepped out of one room where marks had tried to define me and into another where work would begin doing the same thing.

On paper, I was qualified enough to stand beside that pool and teach children to swim. I had worked my way through the freshwater swimming certificates, the Bronze Medallion, the Bronze Cross, the Certificate of Merit, the Instructor’s Certificate and whatever other bits of official paper said I could rescue, revive, instruct, survive and generally behave as though water held no particular mystery for me. I had the certificates, the strokes, the drills, the survival techniques and the practical understanding of what to do when a body got into trouble in water. Paper can be reassuring in that way, because it gives the appearance that the person holding it has become the person the certificate describes.

What I did not have, at least not in any properly formed adult sense, were the interpersonal skills that sit underneath good teaching. I had been on the other end of instruction at a much earlier age, taking in commands, demonstrations, corrections and expectations as a student, and in fact I had nearly drowned myself. That gave me experience of fear in water, but experience is not the same as the ability to guide someone else through it. Being taught something does not automatically mean you know how to teach it, especially when the subject is not only swimming but fear, trust, confidence and the small private panic of a child whose feet no longer touch the bottom.

So there I was, certified but not necessarily equipped, authorised but not necessarily rounded. That was not unusual for that stage of life, I suppose, because youth often walks into responsibility carrying paperwork instead of wisdom. The certificates said I knew enough to be useful, and usefulness was already becoming the measure by which I was allowed into rooms. The fuller human equipment was still being assembled somewhere behind the scenes, though nobody had thought to delay life until the assembly was complete.

Before that fortnight at the pool, I had been moving through sheds. I use the word moving because that is how it felt, not as a grand journey, but as a body being passed along by necessity. The sheds were not symbolic when I was in them; they were places where work happened, where men sweated, sheep objected, machinery hummed, and the day made its own rules whether you were emotionally prepared for them or not. A shearing shed is not much interested in whether a young bloke has properly processed the end of school or the collapse of any delicate idea he may have had about himself.

There is a strange comfort in work that does not ask too much about your inner life. A shearing shed does not pause because a young bloke is disappointed, confused, embarrassed by an exam result, or quietly numb about the disappearance of whatever future he might once have imagined. It simply requires that you turn up, do the job, keep up where possible, stay out of the way where necessary, and learn quickly enough not to be treated as useless. That sounds harsh, but there was a clean sort of honesty in it that some more respectable rooms did not always manage.

In that sense, the sheds were kinder than school. They did not pretend to be measuring your full potential while actually rewarding your ability to fit a pattern. They measured simpler things, like whether you worked, whether you listened, whether you carried your share, and whether you could survive the day without making a complete goose of yourself. The expectations were blunt, but at least they were visible, and there is something to be said for a room where the rules are not hidden behind speeches about opportunity.

That did not mean the sheds were gentle. There was nothing soft about the noise, the smell, the physical effort, or the blunt little hierarchies that exist anywhere people work hard and have limited patience for personal mythology. But the rules were more honest than some of the rooms I had known, because no one was asking me to write an essay about who I might become while quietly lowering their expectations of me. They wanted work done, and in that simple demand there was less room for the complicated humiliation of being misunderstood.

I moved from shed to shed, playing the game like Jack Thompson in Sunday Too Far Away, though without the film crew, the script, or any guarantee that the working man’s nobility would be properly lit. That was where the work was, and when you are young and uncertain, work can become a map even if it does not tell you where you are going. I did not experience life then as something passing me by in a sad cinematic way, with me standing still while opportunity drove past in a Holden with better upholstery. It felt more like life was pushing and pulling, shoving me from one practical demand to the next, and I was responding because response was easier than reflection.

That distinction matters to me now, although I would not have had the patience to explain it then. People often talk about life passing them by, as if they were innocent bystanders on the footpath watching their own existence disappear around the bend. But for me, at that age, life was not passing by at all; it was taking hold, by the sleeve, by the collar, and sometimes by the hair, dragging me towards whatever came next. It was not a spectator sport, no matter how numb I may have felt while I was being moved along.

The Christmas break interrupted the sheds, so I took the swimming instructor’s job. That sounds almost carefree if said too quickly, as if I moved from hard rural labour into a sunlit holiday role among children, water and laughter. The truth was less romantic and more practical, because the sheds stopped, money did not, and a fortnight of work was a fortnight of work. I was not choosing a life; I was accepting the next available piece of it.

Teaching children to swim was a different kind of responsibility. Sheep did not expect reassurance, and shearers were not generally looking to me for confidence, though a few may have benefited from it in ways they would never admit. Children, however, watched your face as if your face might tell them whether the water was safe, whether fear was sensible, and whether the adult in front of them knew enough to be trusted. That is a heavy thing when you are still trying to look like an adult while not entirely convinced you have become one.

I was young myself, even if I would not have said it that way at the time. Youth rarely recognises itself properly because it is too busy trying to look competent, tough, attractive, employable, or at least not obviously lost. I must have seemed adult enough to those children, but inside I was still working out how a person crossed from being marked by school into being measured by work. The pool gave me a whistle’s worth of authority, which is not the same as certainty but can be mistaken for it if everybody is wet enough.

The pool had its own rhythm. There were groups of children, nervous parents, damp towels, whistles, the slap of small feet on concrete, and that constant poolside chorus of splashing, calling, laughing and complaint. There was also the odd solemn child who approached water as if it were a taxation ruling, requiring careful interpretation before any reckless commitment could be made. I probably understood those children better than the reckless ones, because caution has its own intelligence even if the world prefers to clap for the child who jumps first.

The cautious child knows there is a line between shallow and deep. They know there is a difference between standing and sinking, between what people say is safe and what the body believes when the feet no longer touch. I knew something of that, though I would never have framed it that way beside the pool. I had left one form of measurement and entered another, but I had not yet found identity in either.

School had reduced me to marks, sport had offered an approved doorway into belonging, shearing had provided usefulness, and the pool gave me temporary authority over children who trusted me more than I trusted myself. The phrase did not exist in my mind then, but the shape of it did. I was earning a living instead of living a life. It was not tragic in the theatrical sense, and no violin section was required, but it was quietly consequential because responsibility had arrived before identity had properly formed.

That is one of the crueller tricks adulthood plays on people who leave school without a clear next step. The world does not say, “Take your time, young man, sit under a tree and assemble a philosophy.” It says, “There is work there if you want it, and if you do not want it someone else will, so make up your mind before the ute leaves.” The instruction is not always unkind, but it is urgent, and urgency has a way of flattening questions that needed more time.

I was not opposed to work. That should be said plainly, because I do not want this to sound like the complaint of someone who thought effort was beneath him. Work gave me money, structure, fatigue, and the temporary relief of not having to sit still with all the things I did not yet know how to name. It also gave other people a version of me they could understand, which was no small thing when I was not sure I understood myself.

But work also gave me a way to disappear. In the shed, in the pool, and in any task that arrived with a starting time and a requirement, I could become the person doing the job instead of the person wondering what had happened to the larger idea. That is not laziness, and it is not ambition either, though from the outside it can look like either depending on who is doing the judging. It is a kind of numb practicality that can look very respectable when the world prefers functioning to honesty.

Numbness is often misunderstood because people expect it to look like collapse. They expect the numb person to sit in a corner, stare through windows, and fail to function in ways that alert the room to the seriousness of the condition. My numbness was more useful than that, which is perhaps why it was able to last so long. It could get out of bed, go to work, make a joke, complete the task and still leave the main question untouched.

It manifested itself in whatever presented itself. If there was shed work, I did shed work; if there was a swimming class, I taught swimming; if a child slipped under the water, I retrieved him by the hair and put him back where he could breathe. The problem in front of me had a solution, and the problem inside me did not. That imbalance would become familiar, because solvable problems have a way of attracting a person who is trying not to look at the unsolved ones.

That may be why practical work can become both salvation and trap. It saves you because it keeps you moving, gives you something to do with your hands, and prevents the mind from eating itself entirely. It traps you because movement can be mistaken for direction, and the habit of solving immediate problems can delay the harder question of whether the life being assembled is actually yours. You can end up standing almost perfectly still while appearing to be constantly in motion.

I did not have the courage then to ask that question with any force. Courage is not always about charging forward; sometimes it is about stopping long enough to admit you have no idea where forward is. I was better at motion than admission, and the world was happy enough with that arrangement because motion makes a young man look productive. A busy person is rarely asked whether he is becoming himself or merely avoiding the silence where that question lives.

There is also a social convenience in being useful. People do not always know what to do with someone who is hurt, angry, disappointed, or strangely detached, but they know what to do with someone who works. Usefulness translates pain into something the room can tolerate, and if the room can tolerate you, you may start to believe that tolerance is the same as belonging. That mistake can take years to correct, especially if usefulness keeps paying the bills.

That pattern would follow me for years. I would learn, again and again, that being useful could get me through doors that being fully understood could not. I would also learn that usefulness could become a cage, because once people discover you can carry weight, they are not always curious about what carrying it costs. Sometimes they mistake your capacity for consent and your competence for an absence of strain.

At the pool, though, none of that had yet gathered into a philosophy. There was only the cold water, the children, the anxious mother, the small boy whose hair had briefly become a rescue handle, and me standing there in my clothes pretending this was all normal. Perhaps it was normal, in the Australian way, where practical outcomes often arrive wearing the wrong footwear and no one fills out a report unless blood is visible. The boy was safe, which is the main thing, but the method had revealed more about me than I understood at the time.

I can smile at it now, but the smile has edges. The boy was safe, and I will allow myself that much credit even if the method lacked elegance. But the moment also showed me how thin the line can be between doing what is needed and being judged for not doing it in the approved manner. It was an early lesson in how a room can decide that the form of care matters more than the result of care, or at least that both must be supplied if one wants to avoid being misunderstood.

That, too, was part of dumbing it down. Not intelligence in the grand sense, and certainly not intelligence as a badge, but the presentation of response. You could see the problem, act quickly, solve it, and still find that the room preferred a different performance of concern, even if the result was the same. So the lesson was not merely to solve the problem but to make the solution acceptable to people who arrived carrying a different understanding of what the problem had been.

I do not blame the mother. If I had watched my child disappear under water, I would not have paused to admire the dry efficiency of the young instructor’s technique. I would have arrived with fear already moving through my body, and fear is not known for its balanced assessment of procedural alternatives. The fact that I can understand her now does not remove the old frustration, but it does give it more company than it had when I was young.

Still, the change in the child bothered me. He had been ready to continue until the adult reaction taught him that perhaps he should not be. That is not a criticism of care, but it is an observation about how quickly the room can give meaning to an event and how readily we accept the meaning offered by those who arrive with authority. I had been accepting meanings from rooms for years by then, often without recognising how much of myself I was handing over in the process.

School had told me what my marks meant. Sport had told me what kind of ability was acceptable. The sheds had told me what kind of usefulness mattered, and the pool told me that even rescue had a style guide. Being right enough to fix the problem did not always mean being right enough to escape judgement, and that lesson would prove irritatingly portable.

Perhaps that is why I kept moving, even when the movement did not amount to direction. Movement reduced the amount of time available for explanation. If one shed ended, another shed began; if the sheds stopped, the pool opened; if one task finished, the next one stood there with its hand out, asking for attention. There is comfort in that kind of sequence because it saves you from having to answer for the blank spaces between events.

I did not yet understand how dangerous that could become. A young person can survive for quite a while on work, humour, physical effort and the private promise that things will make sense later. The trouble is that later has its own debts, and it eventually asks what you did with all the questions you postponed. It does not ask kindly either, because time has a way of charging interest on whatever you avoided in the name of getting on with things.

At that age, I was still postponing them. I was not sitting down to consider whether I was disappointed, lost, relieved, ashamed, angry, or simply tired. I was earning, moving, accepting, and presenting enough of myself to get through the next room without giving the room too much to object to. That may have looked like adaptability, and perhaps some of it was, but it also had the familiar taste of reduction.

There is a particular loneliness in that, but it is not the dramatic loneliness of no one being around. It is the quieter loneliness of having people around while no one is quite seeing the part of you that has gone quiet. They see the work, the joke, the competence, the willingness to have a go, and they assume the rest must be looking after itself. The rest was not looking after itself, though it had already learned to keep working while unattended.

The rest was waiting, I suppose, though waiting makes it sound more patient than it was. It was there underneath the practical surface, an internal dull roar softened by movement, drowned out by machinery, pool noise, shed talk, and the ongoing business of being young enough to be expected to cope. That expectation can be strangely cruel because it flatters you into silence. People say you are doing well, and because you are doing well enough to be useful, you do not always know how to explain that doing well is not the same as being well.

Looking back, I can see how easily necessity becomes character. Do something long enough because you must, and eventually people describe it as who you are. The worker, the reliable one, the useful one, the one who keeps going, the one who can be trusted to handle it, the one who may complain but will still turn up. There are worse reputations to have, and I know that, but even a decent reputation can become heavy if it begins making decisions on your behalf.

I am not pretending usefulness has no honour in it. There is honour in working, in turning up, in carrying your share, in being someone others can rely on when the day needs hands rather than speeches. But there is a cost when a person becomes useful before he becomes known, because usefulness has a way of stepping forward whenever identity hesitates. It fills the space so efficiently that no one notices the space was there.

By the end of that fortnight, I suppose the sheds would have been waiting again, or some other work would have appeared with the usual lack of ceremony. I do not remember a grand conclusion to the swimming lessons, no final scene of triumph where every child crossed the pool and I discovered my calling in the noble art of aquatic instruction. More likely there was a last class, a final damp towel, a bit of paperwork or pay, and then the next practical thing. Life rarely announces a transition when it can simply hand you another job.

That is how many transitions happen. We imagine life will announce them, but often it simply changes the surface under your feet and waits to see whether you notice. I had moved from school into work, from possibility into necessity, from being assessed into being used, and there was no official ceremony to mark the exchange. There was only the next morning, the next task, the next instruction, and the quiet assumption that a young man who could work should work.

The boy in the pool survived because I reached down in time. I survived those years, in my own less visible way, because I kept reaching for whatever work, task or responsibility was close enough to grab. That may not sound heroic, and it was not, but it was what I had. Perhaps there is a connection between those two rescues, though one involved water and the other involved the far less obvious danger of drifting through usefulness without knowing what kind of life it was building.

I wonder now whether there was another path waiting somewhere, one that required less urgency and more imagination. Perhaps there was, though that is the sort of thought that can become too easy with age, when the past has lost its immediate expenses. At the time, there was work to do, money to earn, and a life that seemed less like an open road than a series of practical instructions delivered by people already climbing into the ute. You did not stand there pondering meaning for too long unless you wanted to be left behind.

So I went where the work was. I went because the sheds stopped and started, because Christmas ended, because swimming lessons needed instructors, and because earning had become the shape of adulthood before living had introduced itself properly. I went because stillness would have asked more of me than motion did. The strange thing is that life taking hold can feel almost like purpose for a while, especially when every day arrives with something that needs doing.

Near the end of that pool day, or some day much like it, I imagine the water settling again after the children had gone. The concrete would still have held some heat, the air would still have carried that chemical summer smell, and I would still have been in dry clothes despite having spent the day teaching others how not to drown. There is probably a metaphor there, though I would not have thanked anyone for pointing it out at the time. I was too busy being practical, which is often the safest disguise for a young man who has not yet found the language for what is missing.

What I felt, if I felt it clearly at all, was not despair in a clean dramatic form. It was more like a dull acceptance that life had taken hold and was not asking for my full agreement. The question, left sitting there beside the pool and following me back towards whatever came next, was whether there was nothing more to life than that. Was there nothing more than being useful, being practical, being needed, being paid, being judged, being moved along from shed to shed and task to task, or was there somewhere underneath all of that a life still waiting to be lived rather than merely earned.

Was there nothing more to life than life taking hold. The question sounds clumsy when I set it down like that, but perhaps it was clumsy because I was clumsy with it then, carrying it without quite knowing its shape. I did not know the answer beside the Boorowa Swimming Pool, and I did not know it in the sheds, or in the space between one practical demand and the next. Perhaps the fact that I am still writing around it all these years later says I never fully let the question go, even while I was earning, moving, rescuing, reducing and trying to stay dry.