Dive In

Big shout-out and thanks to Gili T’s Blue Marlin Dive for making this post (and all my future under-water adventures) possible! Check out their wordpress blog here.

After watching a rather frightening movie about cave diving, I resolved that diving – of any kind – was something I had no interest in trying. Around the same time, I developed a fear of drowning while sitting on the bottom of a university pool and waiting to be “rescued” during life-guard training. While sitting there in the hazy blue, not knowing when someone would come for me as the seconds ticked and my need for air grew more and more desperate, panic tumbled over me.

The grainy glory days. I’m the one in the swimmies.

I had always loved swimming – so much so that my mom used to call me a “water rat” when I refused to get out of the public pool. I had no problem doing the “rescuing” as a life-guard trainee because I was confident in the water and I was in-control of the situation. But putting myself at the mercy of a rescuer, surrounded by a suddenly hostile environment and not knowing what was going to come next was well outside of my comfort zone.

Fast forward to my trip to Flores last June. After a truly magical two days of waking up to dolphins, swimming with mantas, and splashing around in a kaleidoscope of fish, my good friend Erin told me that she was getting her dive license in January. The prospect of diving brought back cinematic scenes of out-of-air divers drifting away into inky blue caves and frankly, scared the pants off me. And that, precisely, is why I agreed to do it.

Trying to get my under-the-sea legs…channeling my inner-frog perhaps?                         (Photo cred: Erin B.) 

If living in Indonesia has taught me anything, it is the collective human need to overcome our fears. Fear drives distrust, insecurity, bullying, hatred, and traps us in the little boxes we know as our “comfort zones.” Unwilling to dive into the unknown, we fanaticize about all the worst-case-scenarios that come with exiting our fortified boxes. Some days it is so much easier to stay curled up in my bed, my mosquito net shrouding me in the safety of a good book and a long nap. Goodness knows my life would have been “easier” had I just stayed home. But would it have been better? I think not.

I have come to believe that it is a requirement of all members of the human race to stretch into the unknown. Although this need sometimes runs counter to our centuries-old survival instincts, it is this very urge of nature – to risk – that makes us who we are as a species. It sent us to the moon, discovered a cure for polio, and fought for the rights of women and minorities to vote. And lest we think this ability to risk is a privilege afforded to only the most adventurous of souls among us, let me suggest that sometimes the most daring and difficult risks we take are those closest at hand – offering to help a neighbor in need, telling someone we love them, opening ourselves to the people around us.

And thus I found myself strapped to an air tank and plunging into the very thing I feared. I remember one training dive in particular. I had had a bit of trouble with water coming into my regulator (the mouth piece that allows you to breath and therefore stay alive) on the dive prior. It turned out to be no problem, but being the green, literally wet behind the ears diver that I was, it had spooked me. I was keyed up before we even plopped off the boat and into the water, and once we started our decent on this next dive, I looked around and saw…nothing. Just blue haze.

Panic gripped at my chest. As we drifted down, I felt as if I was falling into nothing: the unknown. It’s a weird feeling that everything in my brain – hard-wired for my species’ survival – was trying with all its might to resist. Where do you think you’re going?! Who knows what’s down there? What if your air tank explodes? What if you pass out? What if you discover a new sea monster, and then it eats you?! …but you know what’s up there on the surface? Air. LIFE GIVING AIR. For a few tortured seconds my brain was torn apart in a battle between instinct and will. I HATED not knowing where I was going, not feeling like I was in control.

(Photo cred: Me by way of Erin’s GoPro)

But then I looked at the people around me. I knew that this was the big moment for me – the moment when I would decide to trust my instructors, my buddy, the haze that surrounded me, myself. And you know what? I did. And as I gave myself over to the feeling of falling into the unknown, slowly, shapes and shades emerged – a new environment that I never would have had the privilege of seeing and experiencing, cuttlefish, sharks, sea turtles, and nudibranchs that I never would have known were down there had I allowed my fear to take control.

I was enlightened, empowered, and humbled by the ocean – the unknown becoming known all around me. I have become mesmerized by the underwater world and, while still definitely a newbie, have logged 20 dives (more coming in June!). My fear has been transformed to curiosity, confidence, and an insatiable desire to discover more.

I mean, seriously. Did you know these little nudis were down there?  (Photo cred: Mindmaker at English Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=10522727)

It seems to me that, more often than not, allowing ourselves to step boldly (or drift along a current) into the unknown never disappoints. Yes, it’s scary. But it is also necessary. Our ability to reach out to one another and experience what is foreign and sometimes uncomfortable, is perhaps more essential now than ever to our species’ survival.

I’ll leave you now with this brief challenge: What scares you? What is calling to you at the same time that it scares your pants off? Is it, perhaps, time for you to face that fear?

Good luck, Godspeed, and happy diving.

Swimming in Our Sunday Best

After living on a tropical island for three months I have seen the beach for the first time!

 

Teleng Ria Beach, Pacitan

As an American I have a certain concept of what it means to go to the beach. Bathing suit clad families splashing in the water and picnics spread out on beach blankets come to mind. But on this day, a day out with the teachers from my school and their families, the scene looked a little different.

Can you spot the differences?

I knew that I wasn’t going to see any teachers in their bathing suits that day. But having at least planned to change into yoga pants and an old t-shirt before going in the water, I was taken a little by surprise when everyone started wading into the waves in the same clothes they had been wearing when we had boarded the bus at 4:30 that morning. I stood, toes digging into the sand, in my skirt and t-shirt. I looked out at the families happily splashing in the waves, fathers in shorts and t-shirts, children in the casual clothes they had come in, and mothers wearing colorful jilbabs, long skirts or pants, and long sleeved shirts. And then I was invited to join them.

My counter part teacher and her family playing in the water.

Wearing what I might have worn to church on Sunday back in the States, I joined my Indonesian friends in the water. We splashed, we laughed, we corralled small children back towards the shallow water. All the while I tried to keep my skirt on and thought about how I had never experienced the beach quite like this before.

Before…

After! (With my counter part teacher and family)

All I had to do was look down the beach and see people swimming in their regular clothes to know that there was something different about this place. But at the same time the smiles and the laughter and the joy of families enjoying the sun and the waves was so familiar. That’s often how Indonesia feels – so very different and so very familiar at the same time.

A look down the beach.

Sun bathing.

I want to share a little piece of my personal history with you to help you understand what a beautiful experience our trip to the beach was. Almost two years ago in the waves off the Gulf Coast of Florida, I reaffirmed my baptism in front of a group of college students who I dearly love and count as some of my closest friends. We had spent that afternoon playing messy games (that involved digging in the sand, cheese puffs, and catchup), and were still dressed in our team colors. As the sun set, that group of wild and crazy college students cheered joyfully for each person who went out to be baptized.

With my friends two years ago in Florida.

My friends yesterday!

I know that not all my readers are Christian, and I respect that deeply. But the picture I want to create is how that group of my goofy American friends laughing and playing and celebrating in that ocean is connected to my new Indonesian friends who laughed and played and celebrated in the waves yesterday. To me the ocean has become like a promise. It is a promise that across miles and miles and unfathomable depths of history, experience, and culture – across incredible differences – we are all still connected. It might take years and years, but it is the same water cycling throughout the world, the same water that we swam and played and bathed in. And even though we are sometimes so far apart, there is a joy and a delight in the sun and the waves that brings us together. I wish that you could have been with me at the beach yesterday! I wish you could have seen the smiles and the joyful faces and recognized as I did that, although we may be so very different in some ways, we are so very similar in others.

 

Classy Lady