Where My Feet Can’t Touch

Where My Feet Can’t Touch On learning to trust the water after the shore disappears

David Bowie once said something about going a little further into the water than you feel capable of being. Go a little out of your depth. When your feet are not quite touching the bottom, you are just about in the right place to do something exciting.

That quote found me at the right time. Or maybe the wrong time.

Because let me begin here: I do not know how to swim.

Technically, I took swimming lessons. For a long time. A very long time. It took me almost two years to get my head underwater.

There were several things that happened in childhood that made water feel like danger to me. I remember taking swimming lessons as a child and having this moment where my body seemed to remember drowning. I do not know how else to describe it. It was not just fear as an idea. It was fear as memory. Fear as muscle. Fear as breath leaving before I had even gone under.

Every time I thought about submerging my head, something in me said, “You are going to die.”

So for most of my life, water was not something I had a relationship with. It was something I survived.

Eventually, I met a swimming coach named Kathleen. She was patient with me in a way that I still remember with gratitude. She did not rush me. She did not shame me. She did not treat my fear like something to overcome quickly so we could get to the real lesson.

My fear was the lesson.

For almost two years, we worked through that deep embodied belief that water was a danger to me, that I could not be in relationship with it, that I could not trust it to hold me.

And then, eventually, I got my head underwater. Then I learned to float.

Face down.

The dead man’s float, as I remember it being called.

There is something wild about that name now. Because the thing that felt like death became the posture that taught me how to be held.

When this Bowie quote landed in front of me, it hit somewhere deeper than language. It touched the part of me that has spent so much time in water doing the tiptoe-to-the-sand thing.

As long as I can feel the bottom, I am okay.

As long as my toes can press into something solid, I can breathe.

As long as my body is in contact with the ground, I can convince myself I am safe.

But the moment I cannot feel the bottom, I want to run back.

Not walk.

Run.

Back to the place where my feet touch. Back to the place where the surface is familiar. Back to the place where I can tell myself I am in control because I can feel something beneath me.

But floating taught me something that my fear still struggles to accept.

The water will hold me if I release myself into it.

This is deeply counterintuitive. The moment I tense up, I begin to sink. The moment I fight the water, my body becomes heavy. The moment I try to control being held, I make it harder for the water to do what it already knows how to do.

But when I release my body to the water, something changes.

The natural buoyancy of the body meets the natural capacity of the water.

The water holds me. And somehow, I hold the water.

In each other’s embrace, I float.

I know this because I have experienced it. I know I can float. I know I will not immediately drown. I know that with a life vest on, especially, I will be okay.

And yet, if you ask the people closest to me, I am still probably the last person jumping into the water. I am not the one excited to get on a boat where everybody plans to swim. I am not the first one to run toward the deep end.

Because knowing something is true does not always mean your body has learned to trust it.

There is still something in me that becomes deeply insecure when I am untethered from what feels like certainty.

And I think that is what Bowie was naming.

Not water, exactly.

Uncertainty.

The edge where control ends.

The place where the body can no longer perform confidence because there is nothing solid beneath it.

Which is another way of saying hello to today.

Because nothing is certain.

We know this. We say this. We nod along when someone says life is unpredictable. But most of us are still building artificial shorelines wherever we can. We create structures, strategies, routines, titles, relationships, identities, and plans that let us imagine we are standing on solid ground.

We tell ourselves these things are certainty.

But often they are only familiar.

And familiarity is not the same as safety.

This has been one of the great lessons of the past two and a half years of my life.

I remember the beginning of this creative entrepreneurship journey. I went to sleep on a Monday night worried. Concerned. Scared.

The job I had was ending. I did not know what would come next. I had been dreaming about going all the way in on coaching and consulting, but dreaming from the shoreline and stepping into the water are not the same thing.

That night, I prayed. I talked to the ancestors. I tried to listen beneath the noise of my own fear.

And when I woke up the next morning, something in me knew.

I was going to go all the way in.

That same Tuesday, there were two emails in my inbox from people inviting me to come on as a consultant. The next day, Wednesday, someone else reached out and asked if I had more capacity.

That was one of my first moments of trusting the uncertainty of what was to come.

It was me releasing myself into the water.

And the water saying, “I’ve got you.”

But even then, I could still see the shore.

That first year was about learning to get comfortable in the water. Each time a no came, a yes would appear somewhere else. Each yes helped me understand more clearly what alignment felt like in this work. Each aligned opportunity gave me a greater sense of my own natural buoyancy.

I began to understand that when I live in this way, when I move from what is true in me instead of what is expected of me, I can float in these waters.

That first year taught me something essential.

I was going to have what I needed when I needed it.

The work would hold me if I released myself to it.

What was in me was enough.

What was in me was complete.

I was built to float in these proverbial waters.

And, to be honest, you can lose yourself a little when you are floating.

I think about my father, Ron Brown, who famously fell asleep while floating one day and had to be brought back to shore because he had drifted so far out. He was so comfortable releasing himself to the water that distance happened without him noticing.

That is what this work has felt like at times.

I am floating.

I am good.

I can still see the shore.

I am further out than I was before, but not so far that I cannot orient myself.

There is still a visible relationship to what I knew.

Then, at some point, the shoreline begins to disappear. The land mass of the known gets smaller. The distance becomes real. You look around and all you see is open water.

That is when something destabilizing begins to happen.

Not because you cannot go back.

But because continuing forward means admitting you do not know where this is going.

The water here may be calm. But what about the water ahead? What happens if the waves change? What happens if the weather shifts? What happens if the thing that has held you so far is now inviting you into a different kind of movement?

That is where I am now.

Year one was about learning that the water could hold me.

Year two was about getting curious about what had been holding me. I started building frameworks. Creating structure. Naming practices. Developing a model for how I engage with people and how this work moves through the world.

And that was good. It was necessary.

But here is the danger.

If I am not careful, I can begin to believe the framework is what allows me to float.

I can begin to believe the model is what holds me.

I can begin to believe the thing I built is the source of my buoyancy.

And that is not true.

The structure is an expression of what was already present. The model is a container for what already existed.

The framework did not make me buoyant.

It helped me describe the buoyancy.

This distinction matters. Because if I begin to trust what I manufactured more than what was created in me, then I will slowly start building stability around the wrong thing.

I will begin trusting the boat more than the water.

The platform more than the presence.

The framework more than the formation.

The product more than the practice.

And if I am honest, I can feel that temptation.

The further I get from shore, the more tempting it becomes to build something that feels like land. Something that says, “Stand here.” Something that says, “This is the thing.” Something that says, “Now you can be safe.”

But I am not sure that is the invitation.

I do not think this season is asking me to recreate the shoreline.

I think this season is asking me to learn what it means to move in the water.

For a while, floating was enough. Floating was trust. Floating was release. Floating was the practice of letting myself be held by what I could not control.

But maybe now the invitation is changing.

Maybe now I am being asked to turn over and begin to swim.

That feels true.

That also feels terrifying.

Because I still really do not know how to swim.

And maybe what has kept me from swimming is not only fear of the water, but the old belief that I needed something solid beneath me before I could move.

But maybe swimming is not only about knowing the technique. Maybe swimming begins with trusting that the same water that held me while I floated will also hold me while I move.

Maybe the skill can be learned because the holding is already true.

Maybe the question is not whether the water will hold me.

Maybe the question is whether I trust myself enough to move with agency while being held.

That feels like the edge of this season.

Not just release.

Movement.

Not just floating.

Exploration.

Not just being carried.

Participating.

The last season taught me that I could release what was no longer for me. This season is asking something different.

Now that I have released, where am I willing to go?

Now that I have floated this far, what direction am I being invited to move toward?

Now that the shore is no longer visible, can I stop searching for the bottom and begin trusting the water?

I do not know where this is going. I do not know how far I will extend. I do not know what these waters will ask of me.

But I do know this: I am already too far out to pretend I am still on the shore.

Going back would be exhausting.

Not because the shore is bad.

But because I am no longer there.

And once you know you are in open water, returning to shallow ground is not always safety.

Sometimes it is refusal.

So maybe Bowie was right.

Maybe the exciting thing begins where the feet stop touching.

Maybe the creative life, the honest life, the surrendered life, the life of presence and practice, begins in that strange and sacred place where you are no longer certain, but not abandoned.

No longer grounded, but still held.

No longer in control, but still alive.

I have learned to float.

Maybe now it is time to learn to swim.

And maybe the first lesson is this:

The water will hold me.

And I will hold the water.