The Great Dive

Recently I read an article written for a French newspaper. It was obviously written during the Olympic games of Beijing. I thought it was very well written and a beautiful reflection on life. I thought it would be nice to share it with you.

Pierre Foglia
La Presse
Pékin

The Great Dive
A perfect dive is a difficult dive, but so well executed that it looks easy. The same principle applies to all sports of demonstration: gymnastics, synchronized swimming, figure skating. The same could be said about arts, dancers must not look as though they were dancing or writers writing.

The difference is that once a dive has been executed, the diver disappears. His final act is one of disappearance. In that, diving is much closer to life. I mean to death.

All sports, all art forms aim for perfection. The diver, also, tells us what perfection is: to disappear without leaving a trace.

That’s exactly what I was telling you earlier: diving teaches us the way to die.

When we die, right after the great dive, there where we arrive shaking ourselves off like divers coming out of the water, seven judges mark us on the pirouettes we made in life, and multiply it by the degree of difficulty, very important the degree of difficulty. It makes all the difference.

We are marked on the splash, the swirl, the foam that we leave behind upon exiting.
A perfect life is the one that makes no splash. The humblest, the most subdued, those who will have gone through life like a knife blade slices the water without making a splash, those will be the ones getting the 10.