I’m learning how to scuba dive.

It’s a bucket list thing. Something about the water — whether it’s in the reservoir, the river, the pool, or the ocean – calls me. I feel as comfortable in the water as I do on land. I can’t remember a summer of my childhood not spent at the edge of the lake at Chapman State Park. If I could live underwater I would. The next best thing, I’ve always thought, would be the ability to get down there and really explore it myself rather than watching someone else do it on the Discovery Channel.

I’ve had three big loves in my life and they’ve been swimming, horseback riding, and motorcycling. In that chronological order. They’re the three hobbies I’ve always loved and found to be not easy but natural. But swimming has always been my first and strongest love.

That’s why, the first night that I hopped into the pool with a BCD and a tank of air strapped to my back, I was surprised and, not going to lie, a little bummed to discover that breathing underwater didn’t come just as naturally to me as the breaststroke, or even the basic float.

I’d been fiercely eager to get into that pool. But first, there was book work.

The class is only offered once a year, at the Warren YMCA. It’s a PADI course, so there’s book work in addition to pool practicums. I’d been longing to get in on it since interviewing the instructor, John Beard, for a story about it last year.

Honestly, I took AP Psych and English in high school because I felt the need to overcompensate for sucking extra hard at math and science. What was probably common knowledge to most of my class members about buoyancy and pressure Monday night was straight up breaking news to me. I mean, everyone knows these things just as part of the process of being alive. But understanding physics on anything more than a common sense level is always a difficult thing for me to achieve.

Part of the classroom portion of the training involves gathering ’round, kiddies, while Instructor Beard tells you a scary story about a new, unlucky, diver each week.

Except, they’re not really unlucky.

They’re just kind of dumb.

As I would explain it to my children, they make poor choices.

Which is why they wind up hyperventilating on sunken ships surrounded by tiger sharks, or marooned on the shores of islands far from the reefs they were clearly told to avoid the western edge of.

I’m going to be in trouble with the other agnostics when this gets out, but sometimes I like to give leeway to this little inkling that maybe there actually is some kind of order to the random things that happen every day. I mean, free will, sure. Okay. Whatever.

But maybe I make the choices I do because I’m destined to make them?

That possibility makes it a lot easier to stomach the consequences of the bad choices I make.

And we humans are meaning-making beings. We can’t stand an unsolved puzzle. Can’t tolerate an unfinished, or especially a broken, line.

We tend to prefer our dots connected.

For a lot of people, getting their dots connected involves high levels of esotericism and myth-building.

Which is cool. I’m alright with that.

I’ll allow it.

But the thing I like about the main lesson in PADI class is the very reason I couldn’t fake my way through math and science classes in high school. There’s not a lot of room for speculation. It’s physics.

It’s A plus B equals C.

And although it doesn’t come naturally which, in retrospect, there was never any reason to believe that breathing underwater would, it can be learned.

Beard says that no matter what problem we run into in our underwater adventures, the first thing we should do upon realizing that something is amiss is to stop, breathe, and think.

For a chick who’s done a lot of panic cycling, and a whole lot of wandering off course even on land, that simple lesson has been a hard one to learn.

But, apparently, not in this instance.

Here’s some math for you. If X equals how badly I performed during my first confined-water dive, then X to the power of one million would equal how much I loved the experience.

And X plus fifty percent is how much more naturally it came the second time around.