It’s a thousand tiny adjustments.

The first time I dropped down a descent line onto a tropical reef I was blown away. If it wouldn’t have messed up my view, I’d have wept directly into my scuba mask for the sheer beauty of the world so few get to witness firsthand. I mean, I’d practiced mask clearing during the pool work portion of dive training. I knew how to take care of it if it happened. But a good rule of thumb, when you’re thirty-plus feet below the surface of the ocean, is to generally avoid complicating the tenuous physics of being alive underwater as much as possible.

I’d practiced a lot of things in the YMCA pool prior to doing my live dives – the four consecutive onsite dives that would finalize my scuba certification. I’d learned the theory behind every skill prior to those first four dives. I’d mastered very few. The differences between pool diving and reef diving are as many, and as diverse, as the sorts of things living in and around the latter.

By far the one skill I feared not having mastered before that first descent was maintaining neutral buoyancy. Basically, diving is a tricky mix of floating and sinking. You’re wearing an inflatable vest, with a tank of air strapped to your back, and all the while the amount of air in both of those devices – not to mention in your own body – affects where you are in relation to the reef below you and the boat above.

It’s not just etiquette that dictates that we keep our bodies, including our flippers, off the reef. It’s just morally necessary. If we want a reef to be there the next time we dive, we should probably avoid kicking it apart and belly flopping onto it. Diving is basically the act of crawling inside an episode of Blue Planet. And for anyone who’s put forth the necessary and sizable prerequisites of effort and money to be credentialed to do it, being able to exist for any amount of time on a reef is a gift, and a pinnacle life experience.We who dive adore the reef, desperately, and like all non-psychopaths we strive never to harm the things we most adore.

The goal is basically the same level of closeness without actual touching as my kids engage in during every single car trip in the history of ever. Diving is essentially nothing more than a big game of “I’m not touching you” with the ocean. And the only way to win is to master neutral buoyancy. The reef is three-dimensional. It’s not like you reach a spot in the water column and just hang out there. You’re rising and falling along with the topography of the environment, adjusting to the dynamics of your surroundings from moment to moment. Trying to stay neutral.

Never too high, nor too low, but just right. Goldilocks of the sea, ya’ll.

Buoyancy. You can’t dive without learning to master it.

Learning how to constantly adjust for the ever-changing amount of air in your tank – because the more you breathe the more buoyant you become overall – is a skill that comes gradually. Your initial reaction to sinking too close to the reef is inevitably,at first, to (1) panic and (2) suck in a great big lungful of air from your regulator, only to find yourself, moments later, being sucked back toward the boat like a cow in the neon green beam of the mothership.

So you exhale a bit, vent some air out of your vest, and try to nail that pinpoint position back into place. But before you know it you’re in a trench, or on a dropoff, or you realize you’ve been staring into the Egyptian blue void beyond the reef at the shadow of a 14-foot tiger shark that’s been hovering around the dive boat all afternoon, or a silhouetted squadron of mantas for minutes straight, only to discover that you’re a few fractions of an inch from crashing right down upon a gasping moray eel, or a delicately dangerous crown of thorns quietly butchering a chunk of lace coral.

The experienced diver is no more immune to the intricate challenge of maintaining buoyancy than the inexperienced diver. They’ve simply learned to delegate their attention to it onto the less conscious areas of their awareness. Just like experienced drivers who shift without thinking about it, or experienced riders who anticipate the thousand tiny muscle adjustments needed to remain upright on a horse at full canter, divers learn to feel where they are in the water and breathe accordingly.

Because the most efficient way to adjust buoyancy mid-dive is simple, strategic breathing.

You don’t want to waste your precious dive time tugging on dump valve ripcords and trying to get to where you need to be to enjoy the scenery. You want to have to think as little as possible about what you’re doing so that you can just do it, and enjoy doing it.

I couldn’t help but be struck by how much I loved the world thirty feet below the surface compared with its above sea level counterpart. Diving is the only context in which I’ve found myself where the everpresent tightness of anxiety literally washed away and I could breathe effortlessly. Another realization that forced itself upon me during the first six dives of what, I hope, is a lifetime of undersea adventure is that learning to remain neutrally buoyant is no different from learning to regulate the extremes of emotional activation that come along with depression and anxiety on dry land.

Just like learning to keep the exact amount of air in your body that you need to stay right on track in the water, keeping from getting too anxious or too depressed is a learning process. It, too, is a skill that consists of a thousand tiny adjustments each day, and a commitment to monitoring your position so that over and undercompensations can be corrected as early as possible.

It is exhausting. It’s hard work. And it doesn’t happen overnight. Like a new diver struggling to remain just out of “she’s touching me” range with the reef, you spend a lot of time, when you struggle with intense emotion, trying to come down from anxiety and bring yourself up out of the dumps before you learn to realize when you’re getting off course. But just like neutral buoyancy, learning to regulate emotion is a skill that’s both essential and never quite effortless.

The joy comes in learning to do it without thinking so much about it that you wind up missing the beauty that surrounds you.

Stacey Gross lives in Warren, despite her best efforts, and serves as staff to her two daughters and their two cats. She enjoys saying “no” as often as possible, eating what her kids didn’t over the sink after dinner, and weeping silently to herself while reconnoitering the clearance corner at the supermarket for more food to cook and then throw away and brutally assessing her life choices. And wine. She really, really enjoys wine. She is a Leo, and finds that fact almost as hilariously disappointing as her own senior photo. The end.