I started diving in my late teens and then I stopped before I reached the age of twenty. When I say ‘started’ I mean to say I started the training, which in those days took a long time. A year to be precise; once a week in the local British Army base swimming pool. It was military standard dive training run by The British Sub Aqua Club. I stopped training a few weeks before I was to take my open water dives; the reason for which I don’t recall but I suspect it was a combination of boredom and fear of failure (probably more of the later).

Had I taken the open water tests and been successful I would have gained me my license and been a fully qualifies diver for the past 40 years or so.

Time passed, I went to university, started my career, went to live in my first of many countries abroad and always wished that I had completed my dive training. I never lost my love of the ocean. I swam, snorkelled, sailed and spent as much time by the ocean as I possibly could but, I never dived.

When I met my wife I soon found out that she was an excellent swimmer. Sleek, fast and tireless; a dolphin to my sea turtle.

However, she loathed the sea. This hatred was due, I was told, to a near fatal tragedy as a child growing up on Japan’s dangerous, windswept eastern Pacific coast.

It would have been fair to say she was terrified of the ocean.

It was a much as I could do to get her to walk in up to her waist. Over time, with much coaxing, I got her to swim, then a couple of years ago to use a snorkel. The big break-through came around two years ago when I taught her to dive using a snorkel — incidentally it was during those first snorkelling dives that we found our first sharks. That didn’t really help endear her to snorkelling or the ocean but she stuck at it all the same.

Last year she had an unexpected business trip to Phuket.

I decided to accompany her and whilst she was locked in stuffy conference rooms for four days I spent four days on a boat finally getting my advanced diving license. On my final day diving my wife joined me on the boat, basically to observe a little, sunbathe and do some snorkelling. I tried to get her to try out diving but she resolutely refused.

A case of a bridge too far or a metre too deep I suspected.

In all this time we have been together she has known about my passion for the ocean, for ocean life, sailing, the history of pirates, beach-combing… absolutely anything connected to the ocean fascinates me; and most of all sharks fascinate me. And it is a little known fact that Japan has some very, very good shark diving locations.

Now here is the interesting part. On our return from Thailand last year, one of the first things she did was go off to a local dive centre, enrol on a course to take her diving license to advanced level.

No hesitation, no questions, she just did it.

She had her motives and although we never really discussed them I suspect I know what they were. Those motives took her from being someone who just a few years before couldn’t bear to be waist deep in the waves to someone who was technically qualified to dive to 40 metres below the surface.

Now that was a year ago (13 months to be precise). This weekend we have just returned from a local dive site where over two days we managed 6 dives around a small island group renown for hammerhead sharks. We encountered them on every dive and on one of the dives we met a school of over 400; on other dives they were almost close enough to touch.

To qualify to do these dives we had to have had over 50 previous dives, be prior assessed by the dive centre whilst diving in dangerously strong currents and have adequate levels of cardio-fitness and stamina.

The night before the first day of dives Hideo, our guide, told us that on the boat way out to the site in the morning most people will be sick. ‘Because the sea will be so rough?’ I asked him. ‘No because everyone will be so nervous about being swept away by strong the currents’, he replied.

To date we have encountered 7 species of shark and 4 ray including Oceanic Mantas whilst diving but, nothing compares to being surrounded, in deep open water, by hundreds of hammerheads.

Time literally stops. There is nothing but you, them and endless blue. You watch, you breath and you swim and so do they. Eventually they fade into the distance, diminishing white ghostly shapes, then they are gone and you come back to your senses, check your gauges and move on with your dive.

I wrote about ‘awe’ last month and this month we swam right into it.

You can get a little insight into what it was like from these videos on Instagram.

In last month’s Brief I introduced Dacher Keltner’s book ‘Awe’.

I came across the book in the opening paragraphs of Thai diver, explorer, photographer, Pier Nirandara’s essay ‘Thirteen Photos That Will Make You Care About The Ocean’, where she writes about ‘the power of awe’.

You can see Nirandara’s beautiful visual essay here.

Her essay also mentions the book ‘Why We Swim’ by Bonnie Tsui; who writes about the extensive wellness benefits associated with swimming.

Wild swimming, scuba diving, free diving, cold water immersion, long distance solo swimming; basically any kind of extreme activity that is water based. Tsui talks at great length about how these activities cancel out the negative impacts of the Default Mode Network.

Our Default Mode Network is almost constantly active. So much so that psychologists often use the term the ‘Default Self’ to symbolise our usual, everyday waking state. In this state, when we are not typically subject to awe or any other stimulus that necessitates intense focus, we are invariably preoccupied with thinking about predominantly negative aspects of the past and potentially negative aspects the future.

In either case, past or future focused, the Default Mode Network prevents us from focusing fully on the present and unless the present presents us with enough challenges or stimuli to override the Default Mode Network we can just drift through time not really noticing much of what is happening around us — think of it as sleepwalking whilst being preoccupied with past and futures related anxieties.

On the one hand things we can’t change and on the other hand things that might never happen. And whilst we are distracted in our Default Self state all the good things around us are happening and slipping away unnoticed.

And this is Tsui’s point, that because of the intense physical aspect of swimming (and I would add the life-preserving focus necessary when diving) it becomes almost impossible to think of anything else other than what you are doing when you are in the water.

In this state of water based intense focus an overwhelming feeling of ‘the now’ overshadows your Default Mode Network and reconnects you with the world ‘as is’ not ‘as was’ or ‘as might be’. And this is important because only when you are 100% present can you really take in, grasp and appreciate what is going on around you.

The Default Mode Network will work against you when you are communicating with others.  As communicators we need to be mindful of the typical traps we can fall into: speaking for too long, over-complicating information, having too many slides or words per slide, reading from a script or committing what we have to say to memory (which sounds just as robotically bad), leaving out humour or challenging opinions for fear of offending the audience.

The list is endless but if you fail to consider that one of the main facilitators of successful communication is to engage then you will find yourself in the situation where you are speaking very much in the present (you will be focused on the now because the spot light is on you, so to speak) but your audience will be sleep walking through the past or future; Default Mode Network in full swing.

More in this month’s Dispatch, below.

To read the full Dispatch click on the image below.

If you are interested in hearing more about our oceans I highly recommend the podcast ‘The Big Deep’ which is a collection of interviews with people who are passionately involved with the sea. Their experiences are amazing and there is much to learn from them about engaging your audience with captivating stories.

Above all their passion and commitment to helping preserve the beauty that we are dangerously close to destroying is staggering and so admirable.

If you prefer to read then I cannot recommend James Hamilton Patterson’s brilliant work ‘Seven Tenths’ enough. Here is a man who knows how to curate information (more on ‘curating’ information in coming Briefs).

The book ranges from science to philosophy to ecology to history and even personal journal and each part is held together by a gripping fictional narrative. It is beyond question a quite brilliant work that is as haunting as it is tragic as it is erudite.

Click the photograph of my much read thirty-plus year old copy to learn more.

I said earlier that I have a suspicion about why my wife took up diving.

Well I believe she did it for me, or at least in part for me; so that I could experience what I have been foolishly missing out on for so long and because she knew how much it would mean to me to be able to share the experience with her.

This past year has taught me an awful lot about the both of us and quite possibly propelled our lives into quite a different direction.

And one of the main lessons has been that my wife will put herself through anything to achieve her goals. Watching her do that, quite possibly for my sake, has been incredibly humbling.

To put yourself at the mercy of an element requires courage and conviction but it guarantees awe — you are no longer on the earth but you become a part of it — you enter the earth’s substance and become as one.

There is indeed much to be said for breaking out of your comfort zone.

‘There’s something magical about being in the water. The world just falls away and it brings me into the now.’

So says Michael Menduno — Explorer and Dive Journalist — Big Deep, Episode 3, March 8th, 2022

Nicholas Raistrick | Communication Strategist, LABtokyo

Nicholas founded LABtokyo 10 years ago with the express commitment to helping people communicate to their highest potential.

We work with private individuals and corporate groups by delivering training and coaching programmes specifically designed to enhance all facets of interpersonal communication.

To see previous Briefs or ones you may have missed, click The Brief

If you are interested in learning more please write to us here or check our website at labtokyo.com.

We are always more than happy to hear from you.