Learning to Swim: Salutogenesis and Why Meaning Keeps Us Afloat

It’s a painful thought to recall someone we love who is struggling. We might remember wanting to know what went wrong. What broke, what caused the harm or what needed fixing. When that happens, those all feel like the natural responsible questions.

But a sociologist named Aaron Antonovsky spent his life asking the opposite one, and when I learned about how and why he asked it, it changed everything I believe about how people change.

He had been studying Israeli women who survived the Nazi concentration camps, looking specifically at how they coped with the menopause years later. Anyone would expect that experience to leave deep lasting damage, and naturally that expectation is the humane one, because what those women lived through was something most of us cannot bear to imagine.

He found plenty of that damage. But over a third of these women, after surviving, had stayed in good health. Not just physically, but mentally and emotionally as well. They had rebuilt lives, raised children and gone on to live objectively happy and fulfilling lives. But why? Their answer, because they had a deep meaningful reason to live.

His findings led him to start asking a new question. Instead of asking what circumstances damages people. He started questioning what keeps people well. He called it salutogenesis, the origins of health and wellbeing. He gave us an image that I love.

Imagine a river, he said. Medicine, for the most part, stands downstream pulling drowning people out of the water and reviving them on the bank. Prevention is a little further up, trying to stop them falling in.

Antonovsky pointed out something we tend to forget as we go through life working to mitigate our suffering after the fact. He said “Nobody is standing safely on the bank in the first place. We are all already in the river. The current is life itself, with its losses and demands and the things that arrive without warning. There is no climbing out of it.”

So the real question, underneath all the others, is this. How do we help a person become a strong swimmer, whatever the river happens to be doing?

That single shift changes the work. It stops being about rescue and starts being about capacity. When Antonovsky looked at what the good swimmers had in common, he found something he called a sense of coherence. It was not a personality trait or a stroke of luck. It was a way of meeting the world, made of three things, and I find that each one opens a question that tickles my brain and at the same time invokes a profound reflection.

The first is the sense that life is comprehensible. For most of us, the world holds together just enough to be understood, even when it is neither fair nor kind. When something happens, we can place it somewhere. Maybe find a thread or pattern in it rather than constantly experiencing pure chaos. This is often where coaching begins, because so much distress is the feeling that nothing makes sense any more. So in that coaching conversation I find myself asking, where did this stop making sense to you? Because naming the exact point where the thread snapped is often the first place the swimming starts.

The second is the sense that life is manageable. It may be hard, but you still have something to meet it with, whether that is your own resource or the people and structures around you. But the opposite of this is the feeling of being a leaf on the current, acted upon and unable to act. So another question surfaces in this context. When you stop and take stock, what are you meeting this with that you’ve not been giving yourself credit for? People are often better swimmers than they can see.

The third Antonovsky considered the deepest of all, and this is where his work and the work I care for meet. It is the sense that life is meaningful. That the demands being made of you are worth the effort and worth your investment. He was clear that this one carries the others. A person can understand their situation perfectly and have every resource to hand, but if they cannot find a reason that the struggle is worth it, the understanding and the resources can very quickly become redundant. Meaning is what keeps the other two alive. Without it, the swimmer simply stops swimming, worn down by the conclusion that there is no point reaching the bank.

This is the part that really moves me, because it matches what I see all the time. The people who break through old habits or limiting beliefs and not always the ones who suffered least or had the most handed to them. They are often the ones who found, somewhere in the middle of challenges, a reason that the swimming was worth it. A person to reach for or a new self they were still growing into. Something to carry through to the other side that made the cold water mean something.

For me it reframes the whole idea of even stress itself, which I think is the gift his analogy gives us. Antonovsky never treated tension as the enemy because the river is always moving. Demands are not a malfunction of life, they are the texture. Life was never designed to still the water. It’s all about the swimmer’s relationship to it.

I have watched people wait, sometimes for years, for the current to calm before they let themselves live, and the most honest thing I can offer them is that the calm is not coming, and they are more capable than they know.

So next time someone sits with you in the middle of something challenging, I’d invite you to not try and pull them out. Instead ask them “Does any of this make sense to you?” “What resources do you have to meet it with?” Then the one that decides everything. The one Antonovsky placed at the centre. “What makes this worth it to you?”

That last question belongs to them, not you. The really beautiful thing is that when a person answers it for themselves, something shifts within them. They stop bracing against the current and begin, after a while, to swim towards something meaningful for them.

Nobody gets to leave the river. But you can become someone who knows how to be in it. The most powerful and strange grace of it all is that the learnings hold, no matter how the river changes, because the strength was never in the water. It was always in the swimmer.

Thank you for reading.

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If any part of this resonated, it may be worth reflecting on the river you are in right now, and whether you have been waiting for the current to calm before you let yourself fully live.

Sometimes the work is not to escape the water or to still it. But to find the reason that makes the swimming worth it, the resource you had stopped counting, and the thread of meaning running through what feels like chaos.

At Logos Coaching, much of the work we do begins around questions exactly like these. Questions about meaning, resilience, coping, identity, human capacity, self leadership, and what it takes to stay whole in the hardest chapters rather than waiting for them to end before life can begin.

If you’d like to explore any of the ideas in this piece further, or speak with the writer about coaching through Logos Coaching, you can get in touch here.

Related Reflections:

• The Web of Needs

• Ontological Coaching: Working With Who You Are, Not Just What You Do

• When the Broken Becomes Beautiful: Kintsugi, Kintsukuroi and the Architecture of Change

• The Existential Vacuum: When Life Feels Empty

• Paradoxical Intention: The Strange Cure for Fear