DEATH AND LIFE : Learning about Both

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Death

My Father died on the 02 February 1996. He was 64yrs old. He died suddenly from heart failure. It wasn’t unexpected. For many years prior to that he had been battling ill health and was in and out of hospitals. Yet it came like a thunderclap.
To this day, a quarter of a century later, I am filled with dread when the phone rings in the middle of the night. It almost always spells tragedy. I flew back to South Africa the next day. My father was gone. Not only out of life but also out of sight. The fear of death gripped us.

My family have always had an aversion to death. To death itself and talking about it. My mother in particular. She would tighten her lips and dart her eyes, meaning that she felt uncomfortable and didn’t want to discuss the topic any further. “Not dinnertime conversation,” she would say and her voice would send the silent message, “You’d better not be going there.”

This left me with so many questions that my family would, and could not answer about my father’s death. Like, what did my dad look like slumped on the bed when my mother came back from the shower? What did my dad look like in the coffin as I sat there in the chapel? Was he even in the coffin?
Am I the only one who has thoughts like that?

For 20yrs I carried around the trauma of his death and my inability to deal with it. What a burden. That trauma developed into irrational fear. Fear of sudden heart failure at age 25, even though I was fit and healthy. Panic attacks became my constant companion. What a burden on my young family.

In 2016 I felt the need to walk towards my fear and applied for a job at Dunweg. They are one of the local Undertakers in the area where i lived. I got the job as Facility employee. A facility employee is someone who does all those physical things around a person’s death. I would pick up the deceased from the hospital or home and prepare the body for the funeral. I had never seen a dead person before that first day on the job. By the end of it, I had come face to face with death. I’d seen it.

My first thought, once my heart beat returned to normal, seeing my first deceased person was , “Oh, so this is what dad must’ve looked like - peaceful.”. And it was. No matter the cause of death, the deceased person I had the honour of looking after, always looked peaceful.

I came to the point where one day I thought, “This is how mom will look when she dies.”. I know that may seem a strange thought, she was still alive at that point, but it wasn’t. It acknowledged the fact that we are not immortal, that loved ones will die and that we should acknowledge this fact to get the best out of every day with them.

When my mom died in 2018, I was prepared. I gave her the care and respect she deserved. I have no regrets.

Dunweg taught me so many things. They are true professionals who care for the dead and the living. They help families say goodbye in a way that honours the deceased and their family. I also saw Dunweg help families come to terms with death in a healthy and healing way. I am sure that they represent the majority of undertakers in the Netherlands.

Losing a loved leaves a hole that cannot be filled.

I learnt that being open and honest about death minimized the crater of my loved one’s death, minimized trauma in the future and allowed me to focus on life.

Life

I realised that the fear of death had stopped me from living. Sitting down with death, as I had at Dunweg, and having a good conversation with it, opened me up to life. To live life without fear.

I am no longer scared of dying or death. My panic attacks have disappeared. I now walk towards things that scare me, instead of away from them. I am not reckless, just not scared.

I live for the moment and day. I do not know what will happen tomorrow or over a year. Life has become fuller and richer because of the power of now. I dream the craziest things and visualize me failing and getting up and trying again.

I know they don’t sound related but my fear of death was also a fear of failure and full commitment to life.

At the end of every day I rate how my day was. I want every day to be an eight out of ten or up. That is my goal until death comes knocking.

Learning About Both

It takes courage in our modern world to want to move closer to death. To seek it out as it were. In times gone by death would have been more readily available. Death was not sanitised and shipped off as easily as it is today. Today it seems like Death is only reserved for professionals, like the Police, Medical workers or Undertakers. What a great burden we place on their schoulders. It feels to me like we have lost sense over sensitivity. I feel as if we have forgotten the connection between Death and Life.

I am not saying that that i want to see more of it and certainly not violent death. I just think the dialogue needs to be opend up again.
I know that working for an undertaker helped me process the trauma of my dad’s death. It is not for everyone, working for an undertaker, yet it provides a profound love of life.

I had to learn about death to learn about life.

THE TIME OF YOUR LIFE

Photo by Andrey Grushnikov @andrey_nashi

Time and swimming. So closely related. Do you struggle with pacing and does time seem to flash by while you’re in the wet stuff? In this blog I try to explain why that is, how to measure your time in the pool and learn how to match the time in your head to the time on the clock. It’s well worth taking the time for. Happy reading and swimming.

I have Anke Noorman to thank for this post. As a Philosopher, linguist and Artist, she prompted me to write it and outlined the things that should be in it. So, thank you Anke!  I hope it lives up to your high standards. Go check out her website here.

But first, how do we register time in that magical and sometimes crazy lump of mooshy sitting atop our shoulders we call our brains?  We register it as something called Psychological Time. I can see you getting really interested in what comes next. Let’s dive in. 

The nature of Psychological time

Psychological Time could be defined as our subjective experience of time. Chronological time filtered through subjective feelings mapped out in such temporal dimensions as duration, pace and the order of perceived internal and external events.

Thus, you can experience time as flying fast or standing still. Why?
Psychological time is a product of the mind more than a reflection of natural chronological order. (Trautmann 1995).

How does the product of the mind manifest itself? It manifests itself in the perceived flow rate of time. Psychological Time either moves more or less quickly. The mental tasks you perform and the resources you allocate to the timing mechanism determines your experience of the flow rate of time. If you are watching the kettle boil, a lot of your mental attention is going to timing and the flow rate seems slow. Scroll on social media or solve a puzzle in the time the kettle boils and the flow rate seems faster.

The more complex the mental task, the faster the flow rate of time is perceived.  And vice versa. Apply this to learning a new skill, like skateboarding, kettle drumming, a new Language, programming or swimming and you see why time seems to move so fast while you are in the activity itself.

Can we ever experience time in real time? Yes. By staying in the moment. Or what Eckert Tolle describes as the Power of Now. Being in the present is the most powerful tool we have to experience real time movement.
Can we stay in the now and learn new skills? It’s difficult. New skills or complex mental tasks take our focus away from the now and the timing mechanism of the brain.

Psychological Time is thus an expression of our consciousness or being conscious.  Psychological Time is an expression of enjoyment, boredom, learning, despair, fear. Can I be so bold as to say that Psychological Time is an expression of our emotions. In the end Psychological Time is an expression of where we lay our attention.

For more read Psychological Time.

Psychological Time in Swimming

In swimming terms, Anke has rightly said to me that, time feels elastic. It can be stretched or shortened, juicy or tough. And she’s right. It has this “product of our mind” feel to it.
Psychological Time affects how fast or slow we think we are swimming. This of course is crucial to our ability to pace our swimming in longer sets. How?
Most swimmers head off to fast. They are fresh and focused and this means they misjudge their pace or swimming time in their heads because they are focused on other things. Logical as we’ve seen. However, physiologically your body can’t sustain the initial pace because it doesn’t have the fitness. 
Learn to measure your speed accurately: psychological time closer to swimming time and you can sustain a constant speed over a longer period.  The tortoise and the hare come to mind here. Constant speed beats variable speed any day in swimming.

But how can you close the gap in this time warp? By measuring your Critical Swim Speed and applying it. Very scientific stuff this!

What the heck is Critical Swim Speed?

The Critical Swim Speed is your aerobic threshold. Like cruise control in a car, CSS is your aerobic cruise control limit. The speed at which you could swim all day. CSS assesses your current fitness level, and links a time to it, so that you don’t have to rely on Psychological Time going forward. Because as we’ve seen, Psychological Time can be pretty unreliable and tricky depending on our emotions.    
Eventually, and what the whole point of this exercise is, you will be able to translate the quantitative measure of speed (CSS) into a feeling of speed (psychological time).

Measuring Critical swim speed

You measure CSS by swimming 400m and 200m for time. The 400m and 200m should be best efforts. You should try and swim these distances as fast as possible. In Between the distances you take 10 minutes of passive rest. Passive rest means no swimming in between.

So how to calculate CSS.  400m time – 200m time/2 An example: 400m time 7min; 200m time 3m30s. difference = 3m30s/2 = 1m45s. per 100m.

CSS should be measured every six weeks. It is best done with a sports watch.

Note: don’t be nervous. The first time is going to be tricky. You may not know how fast to swim or how to hold your pace. You will get used to it I promise. Just give it your best effort.

How to apply CSS

The application of the CSS requires a piece of equipment called the Tempo Trainer Pro. The TTP is for all intents and purposes a metronome for swimming. It beeps out a time that you insert into it. The time you insert we will get to shortly. The use of the TTP is to counter Psychological Time. It is there to keep you on the straight and narrow and within your aerobic capabilities and fitness. A very powerful tool indeed.

The time you insert into the TTP is CSS divided by four to give you a time per 25m. If we do that with the example above, we get 26.25s per 25m (60+45/4 = 105/4= 26.25). This you can insert into your TTP in setting 1. It allows for 10ths of a second, unlike sports watches, so the .25 can also be entered no problem.

Swim sets based on this outcome depends on your level of fitness, experience and goal. When swimming the sets, we do add time on to the CSS to help reset your Psychological Time swimming mechanism.

Here is an example using the CSS test above.  

10x 200m swum as:

4x 200m CSS +4s = 1m49s/100 = 27.25s/25. 27.25s is entered into the TTP
3x 200m CSS +3s = 1m48s/100 = 27.00s/25
2x 200m CSS +2s = 1m47s/100 = 26.75s
1x 200m CSS +1s = 1m46s/100 = 26.50s

You can always make it harder, by swimming longer, contact me to find out how.

What else can the TTP be used for?

Stroke rate. In setting 3 you can use the TTP to regulate your stroke rate. Stroke rate is how many times per minute you turn your arms. Every hand entry is a stroke. A low stroke rate is 50 Strokes Per Minute or below and a high stroke rate is 80 SPM and above. Between 50 and 80 is the normal range for most swimmers.
What is the optimal stroke rate? That is individual and differs per person. However, it is lower for taller swimmers and higher for shorter swimmers.
Can we measure it? Yes, with a ramp test.
What does the result of the ramp test represent? It represents your optimal stroke rate. But only for you.

Why is Stroke Rate Important?

Because is secures a constant speed in the water. Before I go any further, first some physics and the back story.

Speed = Stroke Length (SL) x Stroke Rate (SR) – Drag. If you forget drag for a moment you can simply say that speed is a function of SL x SR. This means that to maximise speed you should find the sweet spot between the length of your stroke and the speed of those strokes.

The back story is that stroke rate, how quickly the arms are turned, has long been seen only as a function of speeding up. If you swim faster you turn your arms faster. True, but it’s not the whole story. The other side of the coin is that your optimum stroke rate guarantees constant forward propulsion. So, increasing your stroke rate needn’t mean swimming faster.  
The other part of this back story, and that still dominates the swimming landscape, is that your stroke should be as long as possible. You should glide and stop at the front of the stroke.
In fact,  the-data-on-stroke-rate-and-efficiency shows that the longer a stroke becomes, the less efficient it is; increasing Heart rate, oxygen uptake and perceived exertion. So, the story needs a re-write with the inclusion of stroke rate as a function of arm length.

Why is arm length a determinant of stroke rate?

Longer arms turn slower and shorter arms turn faster per stroke cycle. It is a biomechanical fact. Shorter arms displace less distance per stroke than longer arms. Shorter armed people who are also generally shorter people swim less distance per stroke and so have to make more stokes than a taller person. I know, not fair right.
Well in indoor competitive swimming a longer and slower stroke might be helpful, but in open water a higher stroke rate is the way to more efficiently navigate currents, waves and fellow competitors.

Let me remind you that we each have an optimum stroke rate. It can be tested. You are not Michael Phelps who is tall and takes fewer strokes than you and me. Don’t get stuck on the numbers or some well-intentioned person telling you to bring your stroke rate down because it’s more efficient. Or that your SWOLF is too high. That is plain bullshit.

What is SWOLF?

SWOLF appears on all modern sports watches as a metric of efficiency. It is calculated by adding your 25m time to the amount on strokes you make with the watch arm in 25m. An example would be you swim 25m is 30s and take 11 strokes. Your Swolf is 41. What can you discern from this metric?  Nothing really. In their very informative article, is swolf or swim golf really a true measure of efficiency, SwimSmooth point out that it isn’t.

Furthermore, Swimsmooth highlights that counting strokes is going back to the dark ages and that SWOLF is not a valid or reliable indicator of efficiency. Well, why not? For the reasons mentioned above; each swimmer has their own optimal stroke rate and taking less strokes isn’t necessarily more efficient.

So, what’s left to discuss

Nothing. I hope you enjoyed the blog.

Happy swimming and stay conscious!

Give Peas a Chance

Image courtesy of Tayo Gross

I learnt some very interesting things in September 2020 and I want to share them with you. In this instalment i talk breathing, vinegar and how we learn - well anything!

Do you know where your weight goes when you lose weight? Have you ever thought about that? Has it entered your mind? Well it has mine and I’ve always thought that we lose weight by doing more exercise and eating less. Of course this is true, but I’ve thought my whole life that it was movement and sweating that burns your weight up.
Well it turns out that I was wrong. I stumbled upon a TedTalk that gave me the answer I wasn’t looking for.  But oh, how very interesting. So interesting I have to share it.
We breathe it out.
Ruben Meerman gives a fascinating TedTalk about this very subject called How Breathing and Metabolism are interconnected. Check out the link. I had never made the link before. The link is this: we put carbons into our mouths in the form of carbohydrates and other food sources and breath them out in the form of carbon dioxide. 
I also found out that there is a gadget called the Lumen that measures the O2 and CO2 levels in your breath. You can calculate, just like Meerman, how many atoms go in and out and what’s the net surplus or deficit. Very interesting.

It doesn’t stop there. Keep reading because I talk about swimming later on.  I promise.

Next, I learnt how home-made Vinegar is made.  Have you ever thought about how vinegar is made? Vinegar, in old English, means “sour wine”. And yes, it’s literally that. More fermented than wine. Fermented until there is no alcohol left, just acetic acid. The mildest form of acid and hence why it has so many uses (not just for the fish and chips). The Italian household I visited showed me the vinegar bottle in which the vinegar is made. A big Tuscan looking flask. Here all the dregs of red wine get thrown in to meet mother.
Mother or mother of vinegar, is a term used for the substance that develops on fermenting alcoholic liquids. It is a form of cellulose and acetic acid bacteria. It is more common in unpasteurized vinegar, like the bottle I was staring into.
There were various pieces of mother, some big and some small. Mother can be hundreds of years old. One was much bigger than the others. This was the oldest mother. This mother was apparently the offspring of a much older piece that the family had treasured for over a hundred years.
A smaller piece was taken out and given to me. It looks and feels like a piece of liver. Slimly and soft. It does not look appetizing, but it is completely harmless. It stays in the flask getting bigger as it does its job of turning wine into Vinegar.
Mother is also known as Mycoderma Aceti or “Fungus skin of the acid”, an apt description I’d say.
I would never have guessed or given it a conscious thought that this is how vinegar is made.  Have you?

Learning new things is so cool. It turns out that learning new things changes our brains and that’s the third new thing I learnt. Our brain’s structure changes regularly and with it, so do we! Who I am today, I won’t be tomorrow when I wake up. The changes and the effects may be either big or small, but however you look at it, the ever-changing brain means a changed you.

We have neuroplasticity to thank for this. The ability of the brain to make new synaptic connections or sever old ones. And the changes can be for good and bad.  I may learn to play the piano but forget how to tie knots I learnt in scouts as a kid. It’s a bit of give and take I’m afraid.

Our brains are not like computers: they do not have perfect recall, and some things rank higher than others on the memory hierarchy. There are three reasons for that and it has to do with how we learn. Let’s check it out people.

Memory drives learning and change. Memory failure or loss of memory does the opposite.  Memory happens in three ways: chemically, structurally and functionally according to Neuroscientist Lara Boyd. Go and check out her cool Tedtalk Here.

Want to learn to swim (finally something about swimming) or improve your swimming technique as an adult? Welcome to the world of neuroplasticity and brain change.

It turns out not to be that easy.  As a Swim Coach I know exactly how hard it is. You have learnt some pretty hard-to-get-rid-of shit over the course of your life. Even if you’re not a swimmer, you have genes and motor function co-ordination that helps or hinders. I often get asked if one lesson of an hour will be enough to change a swimmer’s technique. Simple answer. No.  More like one to two years if you are lucky. Why?

Because we are all dumbasses in the end and our fantastic brain wants us to work for it. It won’t just give your adult self a quick win of learning freestyle in a week. Where would the triathlon coaching world be if this was the case?

I think there is some truth to the above. The old adage of, “if it worth doing, it is worth doing right,” comes to mind. Our brain wants to know we are serious about this new skill acquisition before it diverts resources to support it. That enthusiasm and energy must come from our attention and willingness to reinforce the learning of the new skill.

Side-note: we pick up bad habits in the same way: by diverting time and energy to them. Bad habits seemingly need less work because they give us pleasure that drives us to the next fix. So if you can makes things pleasurable, you will learn them quicker.

According to Boyd, “The best driver of neuroplastic change in your brain is your behaviour,” and she continues with, “Nothing is more effective than practice. You have to do the work.”

So, what now, practice and get a good coach? Yes. The three ways in which your brain changes are, as mentioned above – in case you can’t remember­ – chemically, structurally and functionally. Sometimes this happens in isolation, but more often than not in concert with each other.

Let’s take a common swimming problem and look at it from these three lenses.
Freestyle Problem: The hand comes in over the middle line upon entry. [the middle line is an imaginary line coming out of the head which we don’t want to cross when the leading hand enters the water]
Analysis: Common problem among adult learnt swimmers.
Result: Snake like motion in the water, drops the elbow. Swimmer has to push down or to the side to get into the pull-through. Hardly any catch.
Injury: Makes Tennis elbow worse and puts pressure on rotator cuff

The problem is difficult to fix for two reasons. Swimmers cannot see their hands enter the water as they are looking down, and secondly they are moving in the water which makes it more difficult for the brain to feel what’s going on.

The first thing my swimmers need to do is place their hands in time and space and water. Easy on land. Difficult in water. I ask my swimmers to swim with their heads down, arms above their heads and hands in a neutral position, shoulder width apart. There is no arm movement. This is done with fins and snorkel. This exercise helps them feel where their hands and arms need to be upon entry. Playing is the best way here. So, play around with your hand position without swimming. go from neutral to wide to streamline. This teaches the swimmer how things feel and induces the chemical signaling that begins the learning process.

Next, I apply this with having swimmers swim freestyle with what they think, is a very wide hand entry. Extreme actually. And even though they feel like their hands are wide, they are in line with the shoulder. This is the trickery of the brain coming out. Once a swimmer sees this on video, they know that their feeling is incorrect. For now, at least.

The difficult part is getting them to come back every time they swim and remember to swim with a “wide” entry. Because it feels wrong. The brain goes back to default. It has to feel wrong before it feels right. Any sportsman will tell you that about a technique change. Practicing this “wide” hand entry will induce structural changes and light up different parts of the brain which is also the functional change.

The brain wants us to get it right, but we need to stick at it.
Remembering the technique after showering and leaving the pool is a hard ask. Keep a journal with what the coach said, how you felt and if possible, add the videos made to it.
This will help you remember the crucial things for the next time you swim and keep your motivation high.

So give peas and peace a chance in this next month. Learn, love and play responsibly. BY that i mean without hurting others or the earth. Have fun in the sun.

The Last Traveller #1 - Home

The last traveler. Stamped in big letters across her port pass. Diana had seen those letters so many times.  They were the rarest words on the planet, yet she gave them so little attention these days. “One could get used to anything,” she thought to herself. Coming back here was hard. The port opened for her automatically. The body scan, mapping her DNA, had already taken place before she stepped out of the transporter. Her port pass was an archaic and official document the confederacy didn’t want to let go of. She was required to have it on her at all times in her travels.  She made a mental note to talk to Etta about this next time they had a serious talk about travel protocol.

There was so much to talk to Etta about. She had a present for her too. She had found it on her travels. It had given her a sense of pride in finding the lamp. Etta would love it, she knew. Bringing back things Etta would like was something she knew how to do. However, the lamp from Xelor would be a constant reminder of that dreadful night, the night she was born. But it didn’t matter. Somethings couldn’t be forgotten; like when and where you were born. Into what state and Tribe. She had wanted nothing more than to sink into the molten rock of Trellidor and end herself. But she couldn’t. The elders wouldn’t allow it. How had they known what she was thinking? This thought flashed into mind as the light of the star gun flashed in the sky. Her eyes traced the white light across it as her mind wandered through the galaxy of her memories.

She shivered at the thought of her birth. Etta had betrayed her. She hated her for it at the time. No need to rehash old wounds. The Last Traveler was born, not chosen. That she knew. How many times had that been said to her – a thousand, a hundred thousand? She had stopped counting. She had not wanted to be born the Last Traveler. There is a desperation and a type of depression in not having any control or say in the matter of one’s birth, she thought. It was the ultimate helplessness and she hated to feel helpless.  She had not chosen this life and role. It had been a chance happening. A random fertilized egg that had brought her to this moment. Why couldn’t she choose another life and not to be the Last Traveler? Why couldn’t she choose not to live?

Nothing would change in the travel protocol. She doubted it would. They liked to hold onto tradition. Especially for the last traveler.  She was their, what had Tesla called her, living relic.

The public awaited as she exited the port. They were always there. Asking for information about the bad lands or pictures from the sweet lands. So curious, the public. Wanting to know where she had been and what she had seen. It was a secret. She wanted to share the beauty her eyes had captured, but it would mean the last traveler would never again travel. Getting through the masses was her homecoming. People trapped in the now that would always be here, this very place and province they were born to. She shivered at the thought of how random it all was.

She touched elbows with many as she walked from the port to the station. Physical contact was a class thing. Even if she wanted to shake hands, it was forbidden. The guards would not punish her for shaking hands, but they would punish those who had shaken her hand. It was unfair, but that was how the system worked. People shouted out their questions to her, knowing there would be no answer. In fact, her return answered their most pressing question. There was still something out there to visit.  

The transport car was empty, as it always was. She punched in the code and the doors closed. She took a deep breath. God it was good to be home. The smell of the tanned leather of the train, the bottle of champagne cold in the cooler and her favourite snack of mixed jelly fish made her almost want to cry. She was home. Travelling takes its toll.

 The city was dark. The electricity was out again. Poor souls who had no way of charging up life cells would be dead by morning. The last traveler has special privileges. She would survive no matter what. She would have to speak to Tesla about this. Power for everyone. She remembered the soft light her mother used in the kitchen while cooking. The beautiful light. Her mother would tell her that the way the light fell from the lamp was important and not just any light bulb or lamp was good enough. That lamp in the kitchen was the soul of the dwelling and her mother’s favourite possession. In those days there had always been plenty of power and light. It was even normal to read after supper and watch the archaic system called TV. That same lamp was now her prized possession and brought her delight and comfort after her travels.

The air was warm, summer on its way. The train docked at her dwelling. She took the bottle of champagne with her. The lights came on immediately and the voice from her AI welcomed her home. “Good evening, Queen Eleanor, how was your trip?”

“Call me Diana, you moron!”

“I cannot compute, try again.”

“Shut up.”

“As you wish Queen Elanor.”  She didn’t answer but went into the kitchen to sit down under her mother’s light. ‘God, how I miss you.’ She thought as the light softly touched her skin, like her mother had until she would never again. Her mother would have had a meal ready and sit and listen to her latest adventure. Diana would be able to laugh and tell her almost everything.  

She passed her AI on her way to the bedroom, ‘Light and power, but no soul.’, she thought. The AI saw everything but nothing as she shed her clothes on the bedroom floor. Almost before they touched the floor the AI was coming towards them, “Stop!” she exclaimed, tearing up. She wanted it to be chaotic and disorderly and fucked up. She wanted her mother to come in and shout at her for dumping her clothes on the floor. She stood naked before the AI. It saw but did not register. She knew how the programming worked; she had seen it being made at the confederacy. It saw her nakedness but did not register it as part of its privacy rules. She would have to scream rape to get any response from her AI. It would trigger the emergency call to the control center and just like that, her life would be invaded. So, she stood there in front of it naked and unashamed.  It didn’t flinch. Neither did she. It was a stand-off. A game. Like when she was a child and they would compete to see who would blink first.  She missed the human touch. The welcome hug or a back rub that came to her from her youth. All forbidden now for the last traveler.

She turned and walked to the bathroom. The AI followed. She had named this particular model Bob. She didn’t know why. Its technical name was Xcilliem 3000. The name of the company that made the AI and the model number or year. She didn’t know and didn’t care.

Bob ran the bath for her. Bob was a slave; she had read about eunuchs in her Last Traveler training. She thought a lot about that. Men without balls. Men who saw everything. Men without testosterone and ego. Testosterone was ego, wasn’t it? How would a world look with men ruling it and making the decisions? She shivered.  She could not imagine such a world. She had read the stories, but her head couldn’t wrap itself around it.

The bath was hot, the stones touched her back as she sank into the water. They started vibrating, calibrating her physical being. She took a deep breath in, held on to it for as long as possible and then blew it all out. It felt good. She let the customised massage tendrils release the stress from her body. It was the only time her body was touched. That wasn’t quite true, but she had to hold onto illusions. This was the only physical relief she was allowed.

The last traveler was untouchable. She had begged to be hugged, but the elders wouldn’t allow it. Her title made her untouchable, ostracized and isolated. Everyone wanted to be her. She wanted to be everybody. Nobody wanted to be themselves. She could just as well have been a diseased creature who people would and could not touch. Tears fell from her face and melted into the water, becoming the collective pain of the last travelers before her.

She was the Last Traveler. Untouchable. It said so in her port pass.