Meditation at 25m Intervals

Swimmer Jeanne Wilson Underwater by Wallace Kirkland

SYNCRETISM
A poem
By Nina C. Peláez
September 28, 2025

My father does not believe in God or therapists—
instead, he pedals his bike past Brighton Beach
to the Coney Island Y to swim his fifty laps.

Once, I went with him and watched as he emerged
from the locker room in faded swim trunks

moving slowly to the edge of the pool. He paused,
lifting his hands over the gray halo on his chest,

pressing his palms together in a gesture
I know he learned as a boy.

My father’s eyes: devout with a darkness
he keeps buried deep inside

where it glows hell-hot as the ember
from the cigarillo his father—a womanizer,

drunk, half-asleep—dropped on the sheets
setting the bed ablaze, and even though extinguished

kept smoldering invisibly inside the mattress springs,
reigniting, sending the house up in smoke a second time.

So my father’s anger burns, a blood-wicked flame
scorching through the softest parts of his interior

until it rages through the house,
blackening the rooms again.

Even in the absence of ideology
I am trying to learn forgiveness—

I watched my father’s body breach the air for just a moment
before he dove, disappearing beneath the surface.

Steam coiling through the chlorinated room,
the ripples his body made still reached me on the other side.

---

Breath, stroke, stroke, stroke, breath… no, not an adult-themed party game, but what I'm thinking, when I am thinking, as I swim lengths of a 25m pool. Eventually, it's unnecessary to count strokes and breaths. You take measured breaths without thinking about it, and a fitness tracker can bother with the counting. I wanted to talk about the meditation that is swimming, but the poem above, published in The Atlantic, hits the mark better than I could. Not the part about a daughter seeking to forgive an angry father, but the thoughtfulness swimming can bring. When I find I'm overthinking a problem, I know I need to get out of my head, but underwater, you stay in your head because there’s nowhere else to go. The only option is to expand your mind.

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Seen in August and September

The Ballad of Wallis Island

Most of this summer has been non-stop packing and planning. Between boxes, hospital visits, financial maneuvers, and getting rid of what we didn't need, this is what we saw.

Murderbot

Murderbot SO1
Apple TV+
What if in the future, a security robot gained self-awareness, hacked its protocols, thus providing it the freedom to think for itself? Also, what if this bot knew it could kill any of its human bosses, but instead, preferred watching stupid melodramatic serial television shows? That's basically the premise of this futuristic sci-fi comedy adventure series, with Alexander Skarsgård as the self-named "Murderbot". It's a nice bit of fun and may make us ask what we expect from our own AI creations, though I doubt it.

The Ballad of Wallis Island
Prime Video
Charles (Tim Key) lives alone on a remote island off the Welsh coast and has seemingly organized a music festival that reunites his favourite folk duo, McGwyer & Mortimer (Tom Basden and Carey Mulligan). It quickly becomes apparent that Charles, a two-time lottery winner, hasn't organized a festival at all but is basically paying the two to reunite to play privately for him. Unknown to him is how the pair split up, and their reunion isn't as simple as hoped. It's a funny, odd little movie that makes you think about your own regrets, nostalgia, and sentiment of your own life, and what brought you to where you are today.

Agatha All Along SO1
Disney+
Agatha Harkness (Kathryn Hahn) from the WandaVision series gets her own show, where she wants nothing more than to regain her witchy abilities. She eventually convinces other local witches to join an impromptu coven to join her quest. Like WandaVision, nothing is quite as it appears in this show, and that's the fun of it, I guess. If you enjoyed WandaVision, you'll like this.

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