Joseph Natalegawa '22 Recruiting Profile

Living in the moment

"Life is an untameable force - We ride its ups and downs like surfers bobbing through roiling waves”    - Lakey Peterson

I’m here today to share with you young swimmers my outlook on life. To some of you, what I’ll have to say might sound cheesy,  sound sappy, sound clichéd. But if you think about it, one of the reasons clichés become clichés is that they often contain grains of truth.

I remember my first competitive swimming session. 11years old,  It was a cold, misty Monday. Sky black as night, goosebumps erect over my dumpling-shaped body. I plunged. Thirty minutes later I was in the emergency ward of the Children’s Westmead Hospital, gasping for breath. My fourth asthma attack of the year. 

For the next two years my swimming career would continue in a similar fashion, but over time, my airways started to build up strength and my bigger lungs meant that when I achieved my first state time later that year I was ecstatic. No longer just the swimming equivalent of a grommet in surfing, I was starting to make waves. Things were looking up. What could go wrong?

Remember what I said about clichés? One of them is known as Murphy’s Law : If anything can go wrong it will go wrong. So life being what it is - it went wrong.

 Shortly after my success, my family and I went on a ski trip, where I broke my legs on a rough slope. It was out of the blue. Unpredictable. A rogue wave of a problem that sent me toppling from my board. But such is life. 

Needless to say, my swimming career took a hit and while my bones were set healing in a plaster prison, my muscles wasted away. Down in the dumps, in a swell and swirl , shattered and chained to a wheelchair, was swimming over for me?

I remember, 5 months later, much skinnier but reinvigorated, I started training again, day and night, chasing better times like an anxious surfer chasing after the perfect wave. If ever there was a movie made on me, now would be the time to insert a hardcore training montage akin to those from Rocky or Remember the Titans.

Obsessed, competition after competition, day after day, I edged closer and closer until that day, 19th June 2020, I achieved my national time for the Australian 5000m Open Water Championships.

At the top of the world - my swimming world at least, I would remember this moment for the rest of my life.

 And I realise that embedded in a lot of what I have been saying is a recognition that life - or at least my life as a swimmer- has indeed presented me with many problems that have had to be faced. And yes, I have a ways to go, but I’ve also come a long way from that 11 year old dumpling-shaped boy. But at the same time, one of the greatest pleasures and inspirations of swimming has been the experience of surrendering to living in the moment, savouring the experience of the water’s silence, the feel of your body knifing through it like a shark’s fin. And after? That fresh feeling of accomplishment - I wouldn’t give that up for the world. 

 The thing is, I never would have gotten anywhere If I had focused solely on my mistakes. Accepting these problems allowed me to focus my efforts on my goals and just swim my heart out, instead of letting my mistakes and flaws anchor me. So while I treated them as problems, it was embracing them, and letting myself swim with my full heart which I believe, allowed me to continuously better myself.

So at the crux of it, I hope I’ve inspired at least some of you, not just to excel and confront the rough seas of life, but to live in the moment and take joys in the ebbs and flows, the calm seas, and the rogue waves with equal passion and fervour. Because at the end of it, at whatever your destination is in life - you can look back - standing on the pinnacle of it all - to see how far you’ve come.