Don't Hold Your Breath

For years I’ve had a recurring dream while sleeping. I’ll find myself swimming around in an ocean, maybe along a coral reef or something similar. While swimming, I suddenly consciously realize that I am easily breathing underwater. And I say to myself, “Wow, it is possible. I’m human, and I can actually breathe underwater. I’ve discovered quite a secret.”

Now, I know for a fact that I cannot breathe underwater in real life. Human lungs just don’t work like that. This dream has never meant anything to me at all; I’m not one to interpret dreams or seek meaning in them. It’s always just been a decently amusing dream to laugh about. Only as I’m writing this blog post have I remembered this dream, and, honestly, it doesn’t bear much significance.

Shortly after arriving in Nkhata Bay, I decided that I wanted to get my scuba diving certification while here. Over the last week I’ve been taking the course when weather cooperates with my free time.

I’ve never been one for extreme thrill adventures or anything of the sort. I don’t really like rides at amusement parks and I have very little interest in bungee jumping or skydiving. Before beginning my scuba course, I figured it would just be similar to a higher level of snorkeling. Something chill – not too hard, not too extreme – and a good skill to have for the rest of my life.

View from the dive center.

Well, as I’ve been diving and learning more, I’ve come to realize that it’s much more extreme than I’d planned. For one, you are breathing underwater. Humans aren’t supposed to be able to do that. We are not fish. Next, the deeper you dive, the more atmospheric pressure you find yourself under. Just ten meters underwater, a diver experiences double the atmospheric pressure we feel at the surface, meaning basically the weight of two entire atmospheres.  At twenty meters, we experience a third atmosphere of pressure, and so on.

And finally, there are so many things that can go wrong. If you hold your breath instead of breathing regularly, your lungs can explode. If you don’t equalize the pressure in your ears, your eardrum can explode. If you head up to the surface too fast, your blood can explode. Well, your blood won’t explode, but it will boil. And if you don’t properly check your equipment, you can run out of air while deep underwater.

To make matters worse, every time I tried to take off and replace my mask underwater yesterday, I for some reason decided to inhale through my nose, allowing all of Lake Malawi to flood inside me, gasping, panicking, and swimming for the surface. None of which is in any way correct.

It’s all fairly scary. It’s neither a simple activity, nor the chill skill I’d imagined I’d acquire. And it’s totally distinct from anything I’ve ever experienced.

Diving is like being a fish. It’s an entirely different world. You are swimming and breathing, simultaneously, much farther underneath the surface of the water than imaginable. Lake Malawi is home to hundreds of species of African cichlids, some of the most varied and colorful freshwater fish in the world, and found only in a few African lakes. 

So here I am, existing underwater, swimming around with these fish for 45 minutes at a time. I’m relaxed and breathing well, but sort of terrified to rinse and clear my mask, meaning that it just gets foggier and foggier – oh well.  Eventually I do indeed get up the nerve to clear it. Kristen, the American dive master, says I’m doing really well, impressively well for yesterday being my first real dive, and that I seem completely calm and relaxed underwater. Which surprises me, because often when I try something totally new, I’m not very good at it. It tends to take me time to learn things. 

The fish swim all around, schools of tiny fish, schools of larger fish, all sorts of different colors. Some swimming upside down while feeding on rocks. Most pay no attention to Kristen and I as we glide by, me concentrating on copying Kristen exactly, whether matching her pace or her depth or her positioning. Anxious as ever to do my best and to be correct, I think I might still be trying to overachieve, even while in Malawi. As with many things in my life, I just want to be able to do this right. I guess some things don’t change. Right now it’s still a bit too terrifying to ease fully into enjoying the learning process.

I’m so glad I’m trying something so new to me. So far, diving hasn’t much resembled my recurring dream of breathing underwater. But honestly, it really is incredible to find a full world beneath the surface of the water. Tomorrow I’ll head out for another dive. Hopefully I’ll be able to get past the whole mask removal without deciding to inhale the lake through my nose.

*Note: This post was written and supposed to be published on Sunday. However, when Erin and I showed up at the one place in town with Wi-Fi, we learned that their router had broken that morning. The new one that was connected was not working. This is not the first time we’ve walked the fifteen minutes to find that the Wi-Fi isn’t working, but this time they asked if we knew how to fix it. We spent the next hour and a half trying to repair their Internet connection, to no success. Fifteen minutes later, arriving at the only other place that occasionally has mediocre Wi-Fi, we learned that theirs had been shut off after it wasn’t paid on time. We left thoroughly disappointed, as we both had loads to do online, including calls to our families. Instead of being productive, we went back to Butterfly to eat away our feelings in mandazzi (the plain fried donuts sold on the street) covered in chocolate spread, oreos, and another lukewarm attempt at iced coffee.

Oh, and my second real dive yesterday went much better – I made it past the mask clears.