David Bowie’s metaphor of wading into the water
“Always go a little bit further into the water than you feel you are capable of being in. Go a little out of your depth. And when you feel that your feet are not quite touching the bottom, you’re just about in the right place to do something exciting” David Bowie
There are some ideas that need to be felt to truly become integrated into who we are. This is one of those.
What Bowie is saying might look like just another metaphor to convey an idea that finds another expressive form in the phrase “Get out of your comfort zone”, or “Swallow the frog”, or “Take the plunge”.
However, Bowie’s more complete metaphor paints a story rich with poetic imagery: someone venturing into grey water, feeling the icy liquid creep up their bodies as they wade deeper. Then, before they move past the temperature shock, their feet no longer touch sand, and now they are floating in the undulating water. Once the shock subsides, they discover themselves in another state of being, where walking serves no purpose, and dormant muscles are required, if only through the slightest effort, to keep afloat.
I think that the most worthy moment to encapsulate is when the temperature shock remains noticeable enough for some part of ourselves to implore our bodies to turn back and walk out of the water, yet our feet begin step on the fluid mass of water instead of onto firm ground.
It is a small leap of faith, although you know where you are going. More than a risk, what you are anticipating is a discomfort, an unpleasant state of being. You are testing whether you will float or sink when your feet no longer quite touch the ground. And beyond that, we are testing the feeling of that initial reticence that bubbles up from our own impulses once our stretched out toes fail to touch the bottom, and we begin treading water. Was that reticence right all along, and have we effectively failed to float? Or was it all a confused exaggeration?
The exact threshold where tranquility can turn into excitement
And that threshold is a sign, perhaps not visible to the eye, but perceptible to the body as a whole, with a little participation from each of our senses and other sensations. It is like a specific perfume you learn to identify, a particular logo, a texture. This threshold moment is one of discomfort, of slight dread and a compulsion to crawl back to shelter. We rationalise it through doubts, invoking the most seductive and compelling of its illusions: that there exists a scenario where we will be utterly confident in our capability to confront what lies beyond; we only require a tiny bit more preparation.
Of course, this tiny bit never stops fractioning itself into smaller bits, like Zeno’s paradox: to travel to the destination, we must first travel half the distance, then half of the remaining distance. From there we will always need to traverse another halfway stretch to reach the finish line. Unfortunately every divided distance will divide itself by half: 2 meters left, 1 meter left, 0.5, 0.25, 0.125., ad infinitum. The fractioning process eternally circles around an elusive zero, which is the finish line itself. Similarly, our “readiness” always requires just another half amount of effort, no matter how small, to reach that impossible level of personal acceptability.
But this assessment of our preparation, if we understand it as a simple threshold moment, does have its limit: our only significant preoccupation should be whether we know how to stay in place in the water, treading it without sinking, and how to swim back. We are not entering the high seas, we are just letting ourselves float for a while in waters slightly deeper than what we can touch with our feet while our heads remain above the surface.
Only when we pass the threshold will we experience what our full being -both conscious and subconscious- is capable of in deeper waters. It is there that we will experience everything that we could not predict with our unfailingly poor assessment of our preparation. We can never know for certain how prepared we are, much less wait for that prized convergence between rationally knowing we are ready and feeling it in our bones.
Looking to the future: negative anticipation and the innate face of reticence
Such alignment is rare. We wish we could abandon our bodies, if only during that threshold moment, where all of our past failings related to that particular challenge heap together into a trickster monster of regret and fear of repeating the same mistakes all over again: for what does this say about us? Are we irreparable? Have we crashed against the absolute limits of our capabilities? Yet it is not necessary to abandon our bodies, to observe ourselves from above as we pass that threshold, which in anticipation always appears supremely uncomfortable.
This illusive veil can become increasingly thin only when we accompany our bodies during this crossing. We face the monsters, pay attention to their stinking breath two inches from our faces, to their claws deridingly grazing our arms, as our bodies adapt to the water’s temperature and our feet cease touching ground. Then, we find ourselves “about in the right place to do something exciting”. We are using new, underused muscles, possessed by a delightful state of slight alert tension, synchronising our bodies to the calm sway of the tide, feeling a unique kind of vitalising warmth fermenting within and radiating to your shivering limbs. Perhaps this time you will swim even further; the water is warm and your mind is happy with this new state of being. Or perhaps not, but that is no matter. You will retreat and feel your toes sinking into soft sand.
Looking back: the rich memory of an uncomfortable yet exciting passage
Thus, if we have remained present with our bodies all the way, avoiding any resort to escapism, denial or suppression of our perception, then the memory of this experience will be more grounded in the reality of it than that of the monster that negative anticipation has created. This will enable us to look back to our last venturing across the threshold and tell ourselves “it wasn’t that bad” or “what an adventure”. We will maybe find that we sank and had to swim back to shore, gasping for breath, but we succeeded with the other equally important half of this action: we learned to see the monster for what it is, which is both a fair warning requiring it’s due attention, and an exaggeration that can only do us a disservice.
This small journey is a common occurrence in daily life. Once we have identified those instances where it happens, and predisposed ourselves to face them in a way that we can capture that experiential, emotional sequence through which they take us, we will have integrated the idea that Bowie was trying to get across.
And it might assume a growing concreteness in our minds, interweaving the products of our reasoning about it with the sheer embodied feeling of the experience, along with a powerful narrative to encapsulate these elements. It might present a level of concreteness akin to a talisman, a charm we can always summon in our minds to protect us through the threshold’s momentary darkness.
There is an argument to be made that Bowie’s own advice went on to guide his life in interesting directions.
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