What Cold Water Does to a Line You're Stuck On

Here is what being stuck usually is, in my experience: too much looking. The line will not come, so you stare harder at the place where it should be, and the staring is itself the problem. In the darkroom you learn this early. The print does not come up faster because you lean over the tray. It comes up in its own time, in the dark, and your job is to have done the exposing and then to wait without poking at it. A stuck line is usually a line still developing. Staring adds nothing but your shadow over the tray.

Out of language, into the body

The sea works because it is the fastest exit from language I know. Cold water does not ask what the second line of the bridge should be. It asks whether you are getting in or not, and after that it asks nothing at all, because for a few minutes you are all skin and breath and the small businesslike effort of swimming. Bridget, who is in her seventies and swims every day of the year, calls anything above ten degrees "practically tropical." The swims are warm now, as warm as they ever get, and the tea at her kitchen table afterwards has been running long, the way late-summer mornings allow. But the cure is the same in September as in January. The head empties. And an empty head, it turns out, is the condition the line was waiting for.

The stuck feeling is usually too much looking.

You do not need a sea

You need anything wordless and bodily that takes you for twenty minutes. A fast walk in weather you would not have chosen. Digging. Scrubbing a floor. The last minute of a shower turned cold. Hanging washing in wind, which is its own small wrestling match. The task wants to be real enough to insist on your hands, or dull enough to bore the talking part of you quiet. What does not work, I think, is more input: another playlist, another article about writing (this one included). The stuck line does not need more words coming in. It needs all of them to leave for an hour.

And to be clear about the cold, because it gets romanticised: the cold is not the point. The wordlessness is. Bridget does not swim in January to prove anything; she swims because it is the day, and the day has a swim in it. If cold water is not your body's kind of quiet, take the warm bath, the long dig, the slow loaf of a walk. It should cost you attention, not suffering. The sea happens to be my door out of language. Yours only needs to be a door.

When you come back

Come back to the page sideways, while your head is still rinsed. I keep the first ten minutes for Morning Pages, written fast and unjudged, and the line is often sitting in the middle of the mess, already whole, the way a print is already on the paper before the developer finds it. If it is not there yet, I do not go back to staring. I give my senses one small job instead (SenseSpark will deal you a smell or a texture to write toward) and let the line arrive at an angle, which is the only way some lines ever arrive.

It was always going to say what it says. The photograph was already there; the swim is how I stop standing in the light. Get out of the room. Or get in the water. The line waits better than you do.