Freediving Turned Me Into a Wussy
Posted By Paul Kotik on 26 November 2001
So I have become I very boring fellow by most contemporary. standards. The thing I want most to be doing looks to the casual layman something like this: a guy in a rubber suit floats face down in the water for a long time, then disappears for a couple of minutes, then reappears and again floats face down in the water for a long time, and so on, over and over. Oh, and one of the ways I prepare for all this excitement is by getting together with a bunch of like-minded people and floating face down in a swimming pool for a while. We call this "static apnea". In the rubber suits. Pretty sexy stuff, eh ? Makes me what the young folks call, I believe, a "babe magnet"?
In the secret world of the wussy all this is seen in a completely different aspect.
I'll let you in on it. It is what's down there.
The moment for me is that in which I am gliding through the world where time and space are fluid, the world of the whales' song and the infinite blue. I am transformed by the structures deep in my genes. Another more ancient kind of being is overlaid onto my postmodern ,human self, ancient software awakened by the depths, running on my modern meat machine. It is a distinct and different life, the life of the dive.
In the most superficial sense, the life of the dive is lived in fragments of a few minutes each, frustrated by our physical limitations as breathless and fragile land creatures.
Here is the secret : it is all one long dive. In the awakened consciousness of the aquatic being, all the dives are stitched together into one continuous experience of an aquatic life.
If you are a freediver, it is true of you , too. Next time you dive, you'll know at once that I am right.
Maybe you're a wussy, too.
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