OK, so perhaps I jumped into the details too quickly on that last post. I apologize, I just started writing about the first thing that came to my head when I was going to write an article about learning to dive, Rule number 1 seemed a natural place to start. But now I realize I must go back even farther for people to understand why I dive.
Aside from the television shows and movies you see growing up with divers jumping in the water and blowing up sharks with oxygen tanks, my first real encounter with diving was in high school. My freshman biology teacher, Mr. Lopatka, sponsored a Spring Break dive trip to Bimini each year. I would have loved to go on those trips, but alas, we never really had the money for me to take them (I kind of used up my share going to Ireland in '01). Nevertheless, a young lady who would eventually become one of my closest friends did get certified as a PADI Open Water diver and began furthering her diving education.
And so it passed, high school went on and was a good time for the most part. I made some awesome friends, watched three kickass football seasons, played horn under 3 different directors and 2 principals, but never did learn how to dive. That's all good, there's not much diving at the US Air Force Academy anyways. Now the Academy was an experience in itself, and there's a whole blog about that here so I will not get into the gory details. I was signed up to take a dive class my firstie year, but never got that far before I left the Academy and returned to Florida.
I took a semester off and began working at Best Buy to get a little spending cash until I went back to school. Well it turns out that I really like cameras, and I'm genetically predisposed to talking to everyone I meet, so Best Buy worked out rather well. I continued working there while I went to school at UCF in the spring, then upon my acceptance to UF for fall semester I transferred up to the Gainesville store and started working there over the summer.
Enter my new supervisor, Lance Briner, new to the camera business as well as new to Best Buy. It's all good, I'm more than happy to pass on knowledge I've acquired from my previous store because we're all on the same team. Well it turns out that before Lance became supervisor, he actually owned his own dive shop. He is also certified as an instructor in almost anything you can think of. So, through this series of fortunate events, I ended up with one of the best instructors around and I will probably never meet a person that is more passionate about diving than him.
Now, to the important part of the post, yes I know it was a long time coming but here it is: Why I Dive. I do not dive to go deeper than someone else, nor do I dive so I can look cool or act macho. I do not dive to push the limits, nor do I dive to prove anything to anyone. The reason is simple; I dive because when I am underwater I feel a sense of freedom and being alive that I feel very few other places. It is soaring through the sky with nothing but the air holding you up, and it is floating through 3 feet of powder as the third track down Alberta Peak. It is riding the melody of the horn as it seems to play itself, and it is painting a picture of the world as you see it through the lens of the camera. That is why I dive.
In the end however, the best part of the dive is always hanging out with my buddies afterwards. It's getting home to my family or calling them up on the phone just to tell them I love them and I miss them. Never will I do anything during the dive that would jeopardize those things afterwards. There is nothing under the water or in a cave that is worth losing that. If I ever lose sight of that, it is time for me to stop doing what I'm doing, whether it be diving, flying, skiing, or even playing my horn. But right now I am living life and loving life.
That is why I dive.
-Z
1 comment:
Yep, that's why I ski. You can't release from the everyday if all you do is the everyday, unless you use LSD. Removing oneself from the everyday almost invariably involves danger. The danger looks forced when you don't understand what someone is doing, but when you're doing it you come to know the line between managed risk and sheer stupidity, though there's always some overlap. Things sometimes don't go your way, those things happen. That's why it's nature, not an amusement park (that's also why I don't like amusement parks- there's no danger).
Probably if diving is anything like snorkeling, there's a whole other world below the surface and being in that is absolutely captivating. Takes your mind away from the above-surface worries. Again, just like skiing, only skiing involves crystallized water and less air pressure, rather than the reverse!
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