Stung out of Samsara

Today I saw a news story on CNN about a 61 year old woman who attempted to swim from Cuba to Florida. After 40 hours and 67 nautical miles Diana Nyad finally gave up, but not because of exhaustion or an asthma attack (which thwarted her last attempt to swim this distance). Instead she was stopped by her inability to fight “Mother Nature.” In this instance Mother Nature manifested itself in the form of jellyfish stings. Although some sources say that she was stung by Portuguese Man-of-Wars, in the CNN interview she said that doctors said they were Box Jellyfish, considered by some to be the most venomous creatures in the world. Despite her apparent failure, she did not seem to feel particularly defeated. She claimed that it was really a triumph of the mind, and in her mind she knew that were it not for the jellyfish she would have been able to finish her goal. This is the part of the interview that intrigued me. It seems to me that such extreme goals like swimming the English Channel, climbing Mount Everest, etc. are undertaken for the most part to prove that man can indeed conquer nature. I doubt that CNN would have been following this story for the past two months had Ms. Nyad made swimming 100 miles in an indoor pool her goal. She already holds the record for “open water swimming without a shark cage” from her 1979 swim from the Bahamas to Florida. This record implies that longer distances have been swum with the aid of a shark cage, a human tool to separate the out of place human from one of the naturally occurring perils of the ocean.

Ms. Nyad’s satisfaction with her performance implies that she did not feel the need to conquer the elements and prove her mastery over nature and its defenses. She only needed to conquer her own mental limits, and that she did. In various sects of Buddhism, there are various forms of meditation. Some considered seated meditation to be most effective, others use the meticulous creation of mandalas to be a better use of meditation time, and then there are those who think that any task, as long as it is approached with concentration and intentionality can be the path to awakening and release from the ego. Given this approach, I can think of no better meditation than a 40 hour struggle with the forces of your mind and of the universe. Perhaps the end should not be seen as giving up, but more like giving in to vastness of the universe and our mere impermanent and insignificant existence in it.