Fear

3 january

I am at the end of my dive. Almost all has gone by the book. The one difference is that I am alone, and most textbooks will tell you that diving alone is to take more risks that need be. I disagree. When solo diving I am both more relaxed (no need to take care of somebody else) and more alert (if something goes wrong, nobody is going to help me). Where solo diving I am truly me, gliding through a world profoundly foreign, and yet familiar. I love to dive solo. Anyhow, all is good today, and I am already in shallow waters. In few minutes I’ll be at the waterfront, so I begin to loosen my cylinders, to switch them from my side to my front. From there I’ll easily take them outside the water.

But the right cylinder doesn’t budge.

It is a very simple problem. The cylinder is attached to my back with a snapbolt, so I can loose it with the flicker of a finger. But this time, I don’t manage. I open the snapbolt, I can feel the lock moving, but somehow the cylinder doesn’t get free. My hand hurts. I shake the cylinder, I twist my hips, my fins hit a line! I’m moving like a beginner! In the last ten years I have logged more than 1000 dives, but the experience has gone nowhere. I am getting nervous. Is this the time that I’ll regret dive on my own? Is this it? What is it what the book says? Stop-Breath-Think? Fuck that! I am shaking the cylinder and I don’t care! I’ll die fighting, fuckers!

The cylinder is loose. And I surface. There is a duck looking at my head popping out of nowhere, and few others divers wearing their gear at the shore. The water is quiet, and nobody will know that I was fantasizing with dying few seconds ago. I place the cylinder outside the water, when I remember that I don’t even need to free them in the water. If I want, I can walk with them out of the water and disengage them after sitting on the bench further. So I was panicking because I couldn’t do something that I need not doing. Way to go, inti.

If I tell this tale to another diver, a non solo diver, she will tell me that I could have signalled my buddy for help, and she could have loosen the snapbolt. Sounds reasonable, but it isn’t. The whole incident took about 30 seconds, perhaps one minute. I could have panicked all the same with a buddy at my side, and she would have never noticed, let alone helped me.

It is 3 january, entering our third year of a pandemic. We are not panicking anymore, aren’t we? We all, even the anti-vaxxers and the tin-foil-hat people, have created our own routines to negotiate our dive into this foreign world of a pandemic. Less hugging, more testing, masks, vaccines… you name it. We have evolved. Most of us are relaxed and certainly attent. And most of us are looking forward to the end of the whole thing. Our back to earth moment, our storing the gear and our going back home.

But it’s not going to happen.

We will keep evolving, and so will the virus. COVID19 will not go away. Eventually it will kill less people, but it will not disappear. The flu killed millions in the few years of pandemics at the beginning of the XX century, and still killed between 300 and 650 thousand people in 2018. We have not think about it yet, but we will learn what to do. COVID19 will not pass, but we will go on. And so we know, just as a diver knows, ahead are our panic moments. But how many more of those can we afford? We know, as certain as we know that COVID19 is a virus, that people will revolt. Some of you that read me think that revolutions are opportunities. Some others believe that revolutions are threats. But now that we know that few of them are coming… what are we going to do?

Happy New Year to you all.