Adults: where are you swimming?

The serpent kept her promise: she taught him her secrets so he could find his way to himself. She taught him to surf, gliding along the walls of the waves, with all the speed he needed and without tiring in the least.

After many months, the dolphin surfed twisting like a serpent, gaining agility and learning to flow along the walls. The brute force of the alligators — the kind that beats the water with muscle — fell behind, gesture by gesture, like a skin that no longer fit.

· · ·

It was the old moray, from her crevice in the rock, who taught him timing: “Haste is waste. The tide has its hour. Leave too early, and you fight; leave on time, and you fly. Waiting, too, is movement.” And the turtle, the oldest of them all, finished the thought, slowly beating her flippers: “Let the current work for you. Don’t waste a stroke. Maximum result, minimum effort — this is what the ancients call Aquacidade.”

How many of us, between twenty-one and forty-two, swim the central chapters of the biography like alligators — on autopilot, with twice the force and half the grace? We build a home, a career, relationships, a reputation; and on some ordinary day, in the middle of the crossing, a serpent crosses our path and laughs: you can be anything, except what you’re pretending to be.

· · ·

But when he looked at the alligators, he felt he no longer belonged to that group. So he decided to explore the oceans, and set out to conquer them, without knowing what he would find.

Fluidity is this: discovering the gift that makes time stop — and letting go, without guilt, of what we never were, to swim light in what we always were. It’s not abandoning the home that raised us; it’s thanking it and crossing on. The question the sea gives back to every adult who enters the water is simple and deep: where are you swimming?

Excerpt from the original legend written by Henrique Pistilli. Read the full extended legend · Continue the crossing: Children · Teens · Adults · Leaders · Wise Soul.