We talk a lot, we humans.

The world fails or flourishes, it seems, based on human interaction.

There’s a lot of pressure to interact, and to be good at it. For those of us who struggle with social exchange, it can be a lot of pressure.

Funny, that I love to scuba dive so much.

Or maybe not. Maybe it’s just about preferring one kind of pressure to another. Maybe it’s just that I am the type of person who functions best the less I’m expected to interact with others and the more I’m expected to observe in silence.

People who love diving – people like me – necessarily love an alien sort of environment. Compared with life above the surface, the ocean at 40 feet seems, at first glance, rather silent.

Far from it, as a matter of fact.

There’s a constant clicking, the sound of life teeming on the surrounding reef. There’s the sound of air being sucked, even and deep into the belly, through the regulator, and the sound of bubbles escaping as you exhale. The little tinkle of a dive guide’s bell as she points toward something you’ve descended so far to see. The little beep beep of the dive watch letting you know that as beautiful as it is, it’s not yours, and the time has come to leave.

The only pressure is the pressure of the water column as you sink, then hover, a foot above a delicate ecosystem that depends on your stewardship to exist. Everything underwater is seen from the outside looking in. Even in the middle of a reef, you feel the spirt of Jane Goodall informing your every movement. Fins up. Hands off. Look, don’t touch.

And, like Jane, diving into the water is an act of letting go. At forty feet, you can claim very little control over what happens, who shows up, and what you can do about it. Anything can happen, and the only control you have is how you react to it. Above water, in our element, we humans enjoy a rather egocentric sense of superiority. Other people and their circumstances are what they are because of a series of choices and consequences.

It’s easy to judge, above water.

But at forty feet off the coast of the Kona shore, I don’t get to decide whether it’s the giant manta rays I’ve come to see or a 12-foot tiger shark that shows up. I don’t contrive the pod of dolphins that decides to play in the wake of the dive boat. I don’t choose whether I see an eel or a marlin or a lionfish or an ono or nothing at all but 60 to 80 feet of deep blue sea.

The silence that exists in the ocean isn’t a physical one, but a social one. The pressure to successfully navigate the world gives way to the pressure to successfully navigate the reef. There’s no need to be articulate or attractive. The only requirement is to breathe.

Intentionally, breathe.

The struggle to focus on one of a thousand different perceptual and social cues, and the anxiety the task leaves in its wake, is washed away at 40 feet, and the ability to breathe is, counterintuitive though it may seem, infinitely more effortless there, with practice. Once the initial awkwardness falls away, the ocean is a vastly straightforward, simple, welcoming environment of infinite beauty. Not an environment without its challenges, but one that demands acceptance, as is. There’s no struggle to change the reef. No struggle to make it better, more what I want it to be. It is the reef, and there’s no changing it. There’s no disappointment when it doesn’t conform to my entitled vision of what it should be. I don’t get to manipulate the environment into my ideal vision for it. The only acceptable etiquette is to savor it for what it is at that moment, and to do it responsibly, so it will be there when and if I’m lucky enough to return.

What a relief, even for forty minutes, to get an aerial view of life – that of the reef and my own – from forty feet below the sea. The ability to objectively, silently embrace whatever circumstances I find is the only treasure I’ve found, but it’s a priceless lesson in mindfulness, and it’s there at the bottom of every dive. That, and a reminder that I am small, and my successes and failures are grossly overestimated in my own mind. Nothing like sitting at the bottom of the ocean under thirty 800 to 1,000 pound manta rays to remind you that you’re not, in fact, too big for your britches.

I’ve only got six dives under my belt, but each one of them has been an opportunity to come up for air, in reverse. I’ve left each one of them reoriented and reminded that everything just sort of falls into place when you stop kicking and just let the ocean swallow you up.