The unknown
In India I grew up in—the 80’s and 90’s—swimming wasn’t a sport or a life skill. Swimming was a luxury for kids with hotel pools. It was a village rhythm for children who had ponds at the edge of their fields. For the rest of us kids, water lived behind fences and price tags. I learned, quietly, to be afraid of deep water. It felt like a world with rules I didn’t know and beyond me.
Eye-opening
Years later, in the USA, I discovered something ordinary and astonishing. Most children here learn to swim as easily as they learn to ride a bike or even walk. Pools were part of neighborhoods, school teams had swim meets, and parents talked about lessons like Saturday errands. I signed my son Adithya up. I sat on bleachers with the smell of chlorine in the air. The instructors’ sharp whistle pulsed around me. He would kick and giggle and cough and try again. Watching him, a thought came, I should scuba dive. It sounded impossible even in my own head. My goals often lived on the other side of a wall I couldn’t name. I worked on them quietly. I hoped one day I’d find a door.
Learning to swim at my age wasn’t glamorous. It was humble and repetitive—nine laps without stopping before I even thought about dive training. At first, it felt like a faraway number. I counted breaths. I learned to float without panicking. I taught my body to trust the water instead of bracing against it. Little by little, fear turned into respect. Water stopped being a threat. Being capable to stand in the pool after a floating was an achievement for me.
I registered with our local dive school. Pool nights were a lesson in patience and precision. I learned to clear a fogged mask without bolting to the surface. I found my regulator calmly if it slipped from my mouth. I hovered in place like a slow fish instead of rocketing up and down. My instructor repeated the same line each week: slow your breath, be calm. I wrote it in my head.
The Finale:
Dive day arrived in Florida. The wind was high; the captain called for a drift dive to 70 feet. The boat would drop us at the edge of the current. It would track our bubbles and meet us down-current. This happened just as we were about to surface. It sounded simple and, to a new diver, like a magic trick. My son—then ten, small, brave, and trained, stood beside me with surprised eyes. My instructor checked our straps, our weights, and our nerves. We shared a look that only divers know: Ok?
We rolled into the sea waves. The shock lasted only a second. Then I heard the sound of my own breath through the regulator. It was slow and loud, like a new kind of heartbeat. The surface noise faded. We descended with the line and equalized, little sighs of pressure turning into comfort. The ocean opened. Light fell in columns.
Drift diving doesn’t ask you to fight. It asks you to let go just enough to move with what it is. We drifted together. I checked my son’s eyes; he flashed the okay sign, and I flashed mine back.
Every skill I’d practiced in the pool suddenly had a purpose, not a test. Buoyancy wasn’t a trick; it was graceful. Clearing my mask wasn’t stressful; it was a blink. Sharing air drills weren’t scary stories; they were confident in our hands. And somewhere, I realized the deepest lesson: the water hadn’t changed. I had.
We did our safety stop every 15 feet. For three slow minutes, we counted breaths and watched the world turn thin and bright above us. When we surfaced, the boat was there, the captain waving. We climbed aboard smiling.
What we learned:
That day gave me more than a certification card and a logbook entry. It gave me a lifetime of quiet truths. You can start where you are. You can learn at your own pace. Some “luxuries” are really just skills you haven’t been offered yet. Goals that look far away often move closer one lap at a time. And the stories we carry are about fear, about who gets access, and about what’s possible. They are real only until we ask new questions of them.
Under the drift, beside my son, with my instructor, the ocean didn’t make me a different person. It let me become more of myself.
After all, it’s all in the mind—and sometimes, in the water, where courage learns to be quiet and true. I cried endlessly!
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