My psychological assessment…
It’s the same buoyancy as swimming in the shallows where we can see the bottom.
But, oh no, for some reason our brain still equates the ocean deep to the land steeps—a cliff.
It’s as if we feel like we are going to fall down to the bottom, get dragged down. “But don’t be afraid, buoancy is the same as the shallows,” we console our minds. What’s really going on is the darkness and the lurking of something that may or may not be there—THAT’S the new “gravity” we are fighting against that we would otherwise be fighting if we fell off a cliff. The darkness beneath equates to that long fall off a cliff after we get in…
We have to mitigate those fears by redirecting our conscious towards the practical buoyancy of the water. But our brain so easily snaps back to the irrational “deep water = falling off a cliff” mentality, does it not? And the more depth there is beneath us the higher probability of apex creatures lurk beneath that we cannot see. That is what it so scary about open water swimming. To the average person whos mind goes into “deep = cliff” default mode, you feel more and more like a pawn in the ocean. Helpless. Bereft of the control you would otherwise have on land, to see danger coming near you, to run, all that dissipates in the ocean. Like a slinky, this is something that takes uncoiling the natural fears found in the far recesses of our mind. It’s interesting, getting into deep dark water is a dichotomy: it’s a calming activity but, yet, we feel so anxious at the same time.
Like Jaws, the most iconic cover of all time, cemented in our consciousness, that is the subminimal messaging that gnaws at us every time we get in dark water. Maybe it’s not the movie—let alone the cover—we think of directly, but it’s those feelings we had that store in the back of our minds as another fear in life to have, one of our survival tools: to minimize risk and exposure to dangerous environments. Ignorance really is bliss, isn’t it? I mean, if we didn’t have the Jaws cover, what would otherwise be stored in our psyche as something so pop culturally potent to gird our loins from an apex predator beneath us? Speaking of apex, it doesn’t help either that my mother recently sent me an article of how savage sea otters can be. Even so rare as these attacks happen, it’s just another one to add to my list of animals to fear.
I had an epiphany just now—as I’m writing, literally!—that deep water will remain the most primitive state of us interacting with nature in a 21st century world. In the midst of us knowing everything the stubborn darkness of deep water will humble our psyche, returning us back to the Dark Ages of discomfort, pending doom. There is no modern invention to lessen the tension of getting in water that you cannot see the bottom. The juxtaposition of deep water and the knowledge-based realm of so many things being immediately accessible and transparent today is jarring. Our modern advances are no match for deep dark water. I suppose you could walk around with a sonar that picks up large predators before you take a dip—as I can see Ben Stiller’s risk assessment character doing in Along Came Polly. Unfortunately, you can’t hold your phone in the water to call for help and you also can’t ask Google or Siri right before you jump in what’s lurking in the vicinity.
Getting into deep dark water, suffice it to say, is a test of mental fortitude and control: calming our fear receptors that are otherwise helpful in preventing bad things from happening and in the event of an emergency. Fight or flight, we have to push back against the Hollywood subliminal messages that paint Deep water in such a negative light. Stepping off a cliff will always be stepping off a cliff and will have a 100% mortality rate. Yet, swimming in the deep dark waters should not have the same cachet of dire fear that falling off a cliff has—most likely nothing bad will happen to you, to me, to the 99% percent of the population who can swim.
If we can step back and gain some new perspective on the way we view deep dark water then we could neutralize our outlook, let our fears sink, take the heavy burden of the Unknown off our shoulders. It’s not every day I can advocate for one to make friends with their fears and call out how irrational some of them are that have been programmed into us either by nature or nurture. By not allowing fear to take over when it comes to swimming in deep water, at least your next experience will be more enjoyable. You’ll be able to enjoy the scenery around you and the therapeutic benefits of water immersion, reminding yourself that Jaws was just a 1970s mechanical dummy shark. Three generations later, we gave that monster way too much credence, it’s time to uncoil that slinky of fear thinking.