Freediving Turned Me Into A Wussy
Posted By Paul Kotik on 19 September 2005
And so I have become a very dull fellow.
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 ocean for a long time, 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's what's down there.
The moment for me is that in which I'm gliding through a domain wherein time and space are elastic, the world of the whales' song and the infinite blue. I am transformed by structures deep in my genes. Another more ancient being is overlays my postmodern human self, ancient software awakened by the depths and executing 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, constrained by our physical limitations as breathless and fragile land creatures.
Here is the secret : it's all one long dive. In the awakened consciousness of Aquatic Being, all the dives are stitched together into one continuous experience of an oceanic life.
If you're a freediver, it's true of you , too. Next time you dive, you'll know at once that I am right.
And that maybe you're a wussy, too.
- Bookmark with :
- what are these?
