Fonyód |The beach

“What have I got to do with stagnant water?”, I once thought. I, who is obsessed with movement, with flowing from somewhere to somewhere. I, who is willing to exchange a brook only for a stream, a stream only for a river and a river only for something even bigger. My relationship with rushing water has been like a career progression: after a while, you always long for something better, bigger, wilder, something that can offer you new challenges. You don’t want to step into the same river twice, no way, you keep choosing murkier water instead. For a long time, I could not really look at my personal development story from any other perspective than a riverbank. But the important breaking point, the zenith (?) of this formation and change was my arrival at Lake Balaton. What happened? Did I go quiet? Did I become adapted to the nature of the Hungarian Sea? I don’t think so. It was rather the new, special language that took me to a halt and made me wonder, the language that is Lake Balaton’s own. From then on, the lake became a relational concept for me. I can’t tell for sure, whether it was when Zsú and I were wandering around the port of Siófok late autumn or during my first summer at Lake Balaton, when I finally got to dive and could feel tranquility underwater for the first time (a performance to be applauded from a pseudo-hydrophobic swimmer) or perhaps during a night swim in Siófok, when I could easily conclude that I got in the grip of the jaws of happiness. As a matter of fact, my each and every encounter with Lake Balaton redefined, chiselled and at the same time complicated our relationship. So today, the real question is not whether I have anything to do with stagnant water, but rather whether there is a life, in which Lake Balaton is not obviously present.