Holding my regulator to my mouth, I took in the unadulterated air that tasted faintly sour. My other hand propped up my head as I fell backward, off the boat into the clear blue water. For a split second, I forgot everything my instructor had told me and I turned a full somersault, my heart racing and my hand fumbling to deflate my BCG. I equalized the pressure in my ears and then finally opened my tightly shut eyes to the most stunning sight ever.
I found myself hovering off the edge of a reef, teeming with life. When you think of an ocean, you think of blue. But I saw infinite shades of the rainbow. The corals, the fish, the plants, and the animals all came together as a vivid collage of colors, in a pristine parallel world. I felt as brave as Nemo when he went to touch the boat as I moved out into the expanse of water, only to find myself amongst an enormous school of barracudas, which engulfed me in darkness. I saw magnificent turtles gliding right under my nose. The ivory sharks hovered near the ocean floor, waiting to feed. Then I discovered that the somber, mousy colored sea cucumbers had gorgeous velvety underbellies. The minuscule, inconspicuous sea worms popped in and out of the sandy bottom. Those tiny creatures were just as beautiful as the huge graceful stingrays and it made me wonder how much more we could see if we stopped in our crazy pursuits of happiness to concentrate on the little things in life.
Underwater, my imagination runs wild. Lost in the directionless swirling waters, I find myself. Down below, I hear absolutely nothing except for my own thoughts, lucid and unblemished, sans society's boundaries. It was where I made life decisions— I decided to leave home, go to a big city and pursue IB —the deafening silence allows for unmitigated clarity of thought.
I feel the pressure throbbing in my eardrums and my heart pounding away in my chest; yet I feel no unease, no fear, and no constraint. The water exerts a thrust on my body but pushing back against it is somehow the most exhilarating thing to do.
Sometimes I hold my breath, captivated by the ocean’s grandeur. Then my brain sets off an alarm and I snap back into taking full, even breathes. There is an inexplicable calm that comes from filling the lungs to their capacity with unpolluted air, a nirvana of sorts that melts away my stress as I am suspended in a state of stillness.
In my head all the fish I saw were… happy. I felt like they were smiling because they were out in the open, doing as they wanted and not confined in a glass tank, unlike my fish Martin who never 'smiled' even when I made fishy faces at him. At some level, I resonated with them. Cold open waters make me happier than cramped Jacuzzis.
Part of the rush comes from the risk you’re taking. When my regulator was knocked out of my mouth and I started choking on the saltwater, panic set off. Spine-chilling moments like that are when I need to remember everything I was taught, regain impeccable composure and look to my team to help me.
Every dive is daunting, breathtaking, heart stopping, thought provoking, epiphanic and adrenaline flowing all at the same time. Breathing in itself becomes an adventure. That spur of the moment decision to take the plunge into PADIs scuba diving course during a casual family vacation turned out to be one of the best decisions of my life. I still yearn for those moments of tranquility under the water, in my little world surrounded by the creatures of the ocean.
It’s amazing how you can find contentment in what can be the scariest of places, isn't it?
