Swimming gives you lots of time in your head

We've all been this dog:

I was definitely this dog last week when I met a log in the water next to the aquarium at Coney Island, maybe 100 yards off shore. Now everyone runs into stuff in the water and it definitely wasn't my first time, but the thing is, the damn log didn't move! It was, like, stuck to something, or else it was a small lure-like appendage of something huge and inevitably terrifying! So, like any grown-ass swimmer, I let out some underwater shrieks and sprinted toward my nearest swim buddy.

And on the way back to the start point, marginally calmer, I thought about this dog. And about this chapter from Les Miserables, which details the horrors of anticipating one's impending drowning in the open ocean. I wondered if I'd've had the same degree of screechiness after encountering something in Lake Huron, where there's like 15 feet of visibility instead of four. Then I started thinking about the parallels between fear of "the monstrous billows of the invisible" in the marine context and fear of death or the unknown in life in general.

Watch out, little AstroDana!

If I were smarter, or more well-read, or more academic, I'd go on a psychoanalytic tear about the id's perpetual, subconscious acknowledgment of its own mortality and how the superego of the open-water swimmer represents a noble yet ultimately doomed attempt to transcend the something something blah blah blah blah blah.

But I'm not. All I know is, if I'm swimming I'm not dead, and also the sunrise looks really pretty when you're surrounded by water, and also it's really fun to look behind you and see how far you've gone, and also the ocean has been a happy enough place for me that I'd like to be buried at sea (full-body, shrouded please).

Point being, I love it, so why is the unknown in the water still so hard to accept?