Open Water

‘The world has a thousand ways of reducing us: some loud, some tender, some dressed as love, some as duty. There are times in life when it might feel easier to shrink. To believe this is the size of you now.

But it isn’t.

When life narrowed, I let the water show me the way. And I swam’

As she reached her late forties, Kate Rew found herself adrift on an ever-shifting tide of responsibilities: of financial and family worries, of health issues, of moments when she felt invisible, and others in which she felt hopelessly out of her depth.

And so she returned to the one thing that had always been, for her, a cannon of joy in a complicated world: swimming outdoors, beneath the sky and through the elements. She swam with family, with friends, with strangers: up a cold Welsh estuary where the tide surges under low autumn skies, tearing the water to foam; down 24 kilometres of peat-dark river from the Arctic Circle where reindeer watch from the banks; in muddy rivers and ditches close to her Somerset home and in Guernsey sea gullies where clear waves towered above her as they powered through.

Kate did not swim to make herself better: ‘life is not an illness and nature is not there for our therapy’, but she knew that swimming is a way of letting meaning sneak back in through the body. It connects us, grounds us, reminds us we’re alive.

Open Water is a life-affirming story of reconnection (with people and with the world) and resurfacing. Taking us on an exhilarating, heart-opening journey through rivers, seas and reservoirs both close to home and further afield, it’s a book for anyone who has ever felt hemmed in or pulled under: a book about moving forward with the current and of not being afraid of what might be around the next bend.