Try to love everything that gets in your way: <br />the Chinese women in flowered bathing caps <br />murmuring together in Mandarin, doing leg exercises in your lane <br />while you execute thirty-six furious laps, <br />one for every item on your to-do list. <br />The heavy-bellied man who goes thrashing through the water <br />like a horse with a harpoon stuck in its side, <br />whose breathless tsunamis rock you from your course. <br />Teachers all. Learn to be small <br />and swim through obstacles like a minnow <br />without grudges or memory. Dart <br />toward your goal, sperm to egg. Thinking Obstacle <br />is another obstacle. Try to love the teenage girl <br />idly lounging against the ladder, showing off her new tattoo: <br />Cette vie est la mienne, This life is mine, <br />in thick blue-black letters on her ivory instep. <br />Be glad shell have that to look at all her life, <br />and keep going, keep going. Swim by an uncle <br />in the lane next to yours who is teaching his nephew <br />how to hold his breath underwater, <br />even though kids arent allowed at this hour. Someday, <br />years from now, this boy <br />who is kicking and flailing in the exact place <br />you want to touch and turn <br />will be a young man, at a wedding on a boat <br />raising his champagne glass in a toast <br />when a huge wave hits, washing everyone overboard. <br />He'll come up coughing and spitting like he is now, <br />but he'll come up like a cork, <br />alive. So your moment <br />of impatience must bow in service to a larger story, <br />because if something is in your way it is <br />going your way, the way <br />of all beings; towards darkness, towards light.<br /><br />Alison Luterman<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/because-even-the-word-obstacle-is-an-obstacle/
