Debra asked Bonnie Tsui:

Why, indeed, do humans swim? Is it an innate need? Or is it social/cultural?

Bonnie Tsui Well, survival first of all! That's the most basic reason, of course, and I talk to scientists and follow traces of our human evolutionary past to talk about this in the book. But after we learn to survive the water, swimming can become something else: a way to well-being, and health; a path to find community, through a team or club; an avenue to competition, which, if you think about it, is really our fight-or-flight survival instincts subsumed in a race setting. And swimming itself can be a window to flow, in all the ways we talk about that state of being: physical, psychological, emotional. The book is structured thematically, by all these different ways we can answer that question.

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