SNM135: Serve No Master Essential Skills – Swimming
One of the worst things I’ve ever seen was a man drown right in front of me. Hundreds of people watched this young man fade away…all because his parents never taught him to swim.
It’s Inexcusable
I realize that not everyone has a swimming pool in their back yard.
People living in urban environments only ever see water on television.
But every year there is a major flood in a new city.
I was there for the massive flood in Nashville.
All these people who thought that swimming was a just a fun hobby suddenly realized that it’s a survival skill.
We have shifted to a society where parents take less and less responsibility for our children.
We expect schools to handle education and we no longer pay attention to the curriculum.
We don’t teach our kids about the fitness or surviving in the world anymore.
It’s harder and harder to stay ahead, so we have to put in longer hours at work.
When you put in a fourteen hour day, it’s hard to have the energy to go over your child’s homework, let alone teach them to swim.
It’s a Problem of Perception
If you see swimming as a survival skill, then it’s a necessity.
My university had a giant lake in the middle that people swam in all the time.
Like other schools, they should have enacted a swimming requirement BEFORE anyone drowned.
But hindsight is 20/20.
As we go through the modern education system, we get indoctrinated into many beliefs.
One of the worst ones is that old things are no longer dangerous.
[easy-tweet tweet=”Most people think that if you shoot them with an arrow, the arrow will just bounce off their “modern” clothes.” user=”ServeNoJonathan” hashtags=”ServeNoMaster”]
If someone pointed a musket at you right now, would you be scared?
We don’t think that people get scurvy anymore or die of thirst.
There is a prevalent belief in the West that we have crossed the barrier and become a post-scarcity society.
We may be on the path, but we aren’t close.
It’s a Hard Lesson
As a parent, I know it’s brutal that I blame a child’s parents for him drowning.
Watching something horrific happen is the very reason that my daughter is an amazing swimmer and that my son started swimming at six weeks old.
We live in the tropics and the pool level near us goes up and down depending on the rain.
Sometimes she can barely reach the edge of the pool.
One of the first things we focused on in the pool was an escape.
My daughter still can’t dive, but she knows how to shimmy along the pool until she gets to the filter.
She can shove her foot into that filter hole and then leverage her way out.
There are many skills that are far more valuable than what they teach in school, and this is just the beginning…
Show Notes:
Key Points:
- Swimming is a survival skill, not a hobby
- Take responsibility for your destiny and your children
- Pass on emergency skills – you never know when you might need them
Resources Mentioned:
ISR Self-Rescue – This is the AMAZING swimming course for infants that I wish was available where I live.
Most other links can be found in my TOOLBOX
Send in your questions to podcast [at] servenomaster [dot] com
Sponsor:
