Lessons from diving

Yesterday, after a most disturbing chat on IM, I found myself frantically dialing the phone. No answer. Redial. No answer. Repeat. Panic rising...what should I do? Dial a second number. No answer. Panic full-blown. Redial the first number. Hang up. No, I'm not going to do this to myself. Not again.

I sat down. And I found myself thinking ....about diving.

I used to think that learning how to dive was a useless skill. For starts, I always felt it was really easy! I mean seriously, how hard is it to:
- jump into the water and SINK...you just need to breathe out!
- equalise, ie. pop your ears...you do that all the time when taking a plane or riding to the top of a really high building
- once below the water surface, if you need to rise higher, you just take in a deeper breath or pump air into your BCD

But do you know what's the single most important thing about diving? Its not in the books. Good instructors will tell you, but most people will hear it...then brush it off in the same heartbeat bcos it sounds so common sense!

In diving, you have a tank. The tank is connected to this apparatus with many tubes, called a Regulator. Air is delivered from the tank, through the Regulator, to your mouth. So what's that important thing again???

If you're stuck under a gazillion tonnes of water, no matter what you do, no matter what you wanna do, the one thing you MUST do, is stick the Regulator in your mouth and breathe. See, common sense right? But if you speak to diving instructors the world over, they'll tell you that underwater, people panic and take their Regulators out of their mouth all the time.

And so, as I was about to pick up the phone to redial another number. I decided no. When you feel like you're suffocating under the weight of the world, when you feel like taking another breath is simply too much effort, when you feel your heart pound and the panic rising...why would you throw away your Regulator?

Regulator - the thing that regulates

I picked up my harness and left the office.