My scuba class, in all of its awesomeness, is on a daily uphill battle to earn my affection. It’s at 8 a.m., it involves jumping in water, it’s a lot of work, and did I mention it’s at 8 a.m.? Of course, doing somersaults and skin diving eventually bring in the winds of my affection. However, in the beginning, there’s always a strong urge to avoid getting in the water.
In our most recent class we were told we’d be spending the first few minutes of the class doing some calculations on breathing rates and oxygen levels that would help us with our diving. What we all heard was that we’d be delaying our entry into the water by 10 to 15 minutes. I’ve never been so excited to use math.
Our coach sat us all down and started to run down some numbers on the dry-erase board. Time passed, notes were taken, spaces were zoned out and then, all of a sudden, I get that frigidity feeling. It’s that feeling I get around 30 minutes of an 75-minute class has passed, just enough to let you know you’ve made progress and just to enough to depress you on the prospect of how far you have to go. In this case, with only 30 minutes left until we couldn’t go diving, my thoughts turned to speculation: through the utilization of the dumbest of questions, could I stall this man to the point where I wouldn’t have to get in the water?
Faced with this speculative task, I knew I couldn’t go in it alone. The problem was I didn’t know for sure if I’d have backup. Maybe they liked getting wet. Maybe I’d be left hanging.
Maybe it was the three people fully sprawled out on the ground, the guy obviously hungover on a Wednesday, or perhaps it was the guy who was still wearing his Ray-Bans, but as I looked around, I realized something about the class: Nobody wanted to get wet.
I don’t know how, but, in tune with my realization, the rest of the class was instilled with the same motivation. We were going for the gold, and getting wet was an automatic disqualification.
What happened next was a collection of the most brilliantly long-winded questions that can only be compared to the 1996 U.S.A. Dream Team in terms of my categorical astonishment. Can you please go over the entire process again, this time in a more detailed manner? What are all of the safety hazards involved with scuba diving? How much can I or can’t I do of these substances prior to or after diving-the answer is always none? How did you meet your wife? We knew all the answers, we just had to fill time.
Five minutes before we were in the clear, the dry zone, we began to sweat. We were running out of questions to ask. But, then, when all appeared lost, we saw it in our coach’s eye-that glimmer of respect for a noble effort . He didn’t want to get in the water either; he was going to carry us home.
Class ended and we were dry. Mission accomplished. We dispersed and went about our day. Without discussion, we all became proud of ourselves, for in that class we discovered that, as humans, we have not become so detached from each other that we cannot still orient an unspoken effort to remain dry.
