But forget that - think how strange it is for a person to be floating around beneath the waves. Forgive the anthropomorphisizing and picture a fish with artificial arms and legs, a big bowl of water over its head, lurching drunkenly down the street with perilously little control over its basic motor functions. The only reasonable reaction you could have to such a thing could be simply stated as: "What the fuck?" If tuna had better-developed frontal lobes, I think this is the same sentiment they'd express at the sight of a human floundering around by their neighborhood reef.
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| Kind of like this. |
But judgmental aquatic fauna be damned, last week I decided to take the plunge (semi-literally) and get certified as a scuba diver. Scuba diving has been one of those life-long dreams that was, until now, thwarted by unfavorable geography, limited leisure time, and woefully inadequate disposable income. Since two of those three problems are currently under control I decided to seize the crab by the pincers and go for it.
Now, there are two fairly substantial reasons why scuba diving might not be a great hobby for me. The first one is medical. I have asthma, which occasionally causes problems when I try to breathe. Breathing is an important part of not dying underwater. In fact there are few worse places to have breathing problems. And although my asthma is generally not exercise-induced, it is occasionally anxiety-induced. There are ample opportunities for anxiety to pop up when the only things keeping you from drowning are a big aluminum can and some fancy rubber tubes. But I shouldn't exaggerate this concern - a standard ventolin inhalor usually keeps things under excellent control and asthma has never prevented me from pursuing any other physically/mentally demanding form of recreation.
The second reason is really the one to focus on: an almost pathological fear of failure. I'm not just afraid of failing the final test - I'm petrified by the idea of failing any little quiz along the way. This is why I quit playing the piano when I was 12 - every missed note was a screeching rusty nail scraping against the blackboard of my psyche. This is why I gave up on Spanish after my junior year of high school - misconjugated verbs and faulty gender pronouns made me shudder so hard that I'd abandon the endeavor entirely rather than risk another potentially embarrassing slip up. Era embarassado, indeed...
I think giving up is so appealing because it allows me to keep the "what if" narrative alive in my head. It's easy to convince myself that if I'd actually practiced the piano and applied myself a bit, I would have become an excellent pianist. My "failure", in this case, becomes a failure of motivation rather than ability. And failures of motivation are always easy to rationalize because you just have to convince yourself that you weren't really motivated to pursue something because it was obviously pointless/stupid/trivial/etc.
Of course, at some level you know that such reasoning is utter bullshit. At some point all the mini-adventures you have aborted or failed to begin reach a critical mass and you come face to face with an ugly black-toothed gremlin who informs you that you're a stinking gutless coward who will sleepwalk through a pathetic and vacuous existence before dying alone and unfulfilled in a dark alley full of garbage and sick cats.
This was my experience, at least (some mild artistic license taken with the imagery - the gremlin was actually quite polite and had excellent teeth.)
I encountered the gremlin about nine months before coming to Korea as I was wrapping up my university studies. College is usually a time for experimentation, exploration, and a lot of other long words that begin with "e", but for me it was basically a four year exercise in fear of failure. It wasn't until my last semester of college, when I was introduced to the Buddhist teachings, that I finally found a solution. And every step I've taken since then, from getting on the plane to jumping in the water, has been influenced by those lessons.
Let's use scuba training as a specific example.
Before last Saturday, I had never strapped on an air cylinder before. I was unable to define the term "negative buoyancy". I could not tell you the difference between a second-stage regulator and Austin Powers' Swedish-Made Penis Enlarger. Given my lack of familiarity with the topic and its relative complexity, there was a fairly high chance that I would be failing in many little ways throughout the two-day training session. A hundred opportunities to feel ashamed and worthless in the eyes of authority figures, friends, peers, and myself. Damn...
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| WTF? |
I thought about this on the train ride up to Seoul. And I was pleased to discover that my instinctual reaction was a kind of cheerful "Meh." It's not like I was looking forward to fucking up. But imagining the moment of failure had lost its paralyzing intensity. There is probably some Buddhist terminology that describes this situation pretty well (e.g. understanding the Ultimate Reality underlying the Conventional Reality that we experience moment by moment etc....) but I don't understand it well enough to include it in an explanation. In the simpler words that my teacher Mark used, though, the feeling could be expressed as one of compassionate non-judgment.
Understanding that you're going to make mistakes. Admitting that its uncomfortable to feel lost and confused and seeing nothing inherently wrong with the feeling. Realizing that tearing yourself a new one accomplishes very little. Brushing off your scraped knees and getting to your feet. Leaving your pride in the nearest waste basket and continuing down the road.
Alright, so I was feeling positive and accepting and calm and all-in-all very Buddhisty around that time. It was Saturday afternoon and it was time for our first actual dive in the pool. This was another opportunity to practice non-judgement. The pool was aptly named "The Dungeon". It sat in the basement of what seemed to be a kindergarten/residential home. There was an awful lot of dust floating in the pool. Also spiders. Quite a few small, black, thoroughly drowned spiders in that pool. But I really didn't mind. In some weird way it made the whole thing seem more outlaw-ish and romantic. Equanimity in action.
I wasn't feeling nearly as generous the next day when it was time for our open-mask swim. Real quick - when you dive, you wear a mask that covers your eyes and nose. I'd say the two most important things the mask does are: 1) allows you to see and 2) prevents you from trying to breathe through your nose and nasally drowning yourself. During the open mask swim you voluntarily relinquish these two advantages to simulate losing your mask in the open ocean. Obviously this is a good skill to learn but, like childbirth, the experience itself can be kind of shitty.
And oh lord, did I fail that test. One of the main rules of scuba diving is to avoid quickly ascending to the surface. It can make your lungs pop or cause nitrogen bubbles in your brain or something equally unpleasant. Anyways, I quickly ascended to the surface. Twice.
I was on the bottom of the pool (only about 5 meters down, but still). I took off my mask and swam around, then attempted to put on the mask again. This wouldn't have been a problem except I wasn't breathing through my mouth, which was attached to a regulator mouthpiece providing perfectly breathable oxygen - I was breathing through my nose, which was attached to nothing but water that was doing its best to drown me (I didn't know this at the time - it was noticed by my keen-eyed South African friend Haig). Panicked, I kicked to the surface and sputtered my way to the side of the pool. Twice.
2008 Nick would have been royally kicking his own ass over this repeated failure. And to be honest a couple of highly worrying thoughts flitted through my mind - "Am I going to be denied certification if I can't do this?" and "What if it happens in the ocean - I'm fucked!" being the two most note-worthy. Yet miraculously these thoughts didn't stick around to torment me. They weren't running on a continuous loop through my brain like they would have a short time ago. And it wasn't like I was doing something extraordinary to push these thoughts out of my head. I just wasn't allowing my grasping, unconscious mind to keep them in. Not trying to control things - letting it be. Mindfulness practice being practiced. The thoughts popped in, said hello, and were replaced by new thoughts. Like, "How bad would it smell if I peed in this wetsuit?"
Long story short - Haig told me about my breathing technique issues. Since I wasn't hysterically consumed with fear or self-judgment or frustration, I was able to apply his advice and breathe exclusively through my mouthpiece. I still felt a little twinge of fear when I popped off the mask, and again when I tried to put it back on my head, but the fear was manageable and temporary. I got a little certificate that says I passed some level or whatever and in two weeks I will go to the ocean to finish my training and become a fully certified scuba diver. Mostly thanks to a South African engineer and the teachings of an itinerant Indian who lived about 2,500 years ago. These dudes helped an American English teacher get scuba certified in South Korea. What an odd, small, nonsensical world this is.
One final note - there is something very meditative about scuba diving. You can feel your arms and legs moving in the water without having to exert any energy to keep you upright. They don't really have to do anything - just be there. It's not quite like being disembodied but it's kind of like giving your body a nice break from gravity-imposed requirements and just letting it be.
More interesting though, is the breath. In all the meditation sits I've ever done, I have rarely paid such close attention to the breath as I did underwater. At times the breath seemed like literally the only thing in the world. Part of this was due to the weird, unearthly, Darth-Vader-like sound the regulator makes and the tiny bubbles that float to the surface with every exhale. But mostly I think it is because when you are underwater, nothing is more important than the breath. It consumes your full attention. You breathe slowly and deeply because that's the most efficient way to use the air in your tank, and it keeps you from panicking.
It feels a lot like the breath that comes when you have been sitting for a while and your mind has calmed down and your heart isn't pounding so fast and you can just relax and allow things to unfold exactly as they are going to anyway.
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| Neat. |
