Yesterday I went scuba diving.

I’ve been diving since I was a kid. Both sides of my family are big into scuba. We used to go twice a year growing up, but 13 years ago, I had a major eardrum injury and wasn’t able to dive again. I tried a couple of times, but I was never able to decompress after the injury. Yesterday was the first time in 13 years and it worked. That is, my eardrum worked; I was able to decompress again.

I’ve led a healthy lifestyle for most of my life. Most recently, in the past few years, I’ve gotten even better about taking care of myself. I figured that, I’ve tried my best at being healthy, that probably by now, my eardrum is fully recovered and I should be able to dive. It had and I did.

Diving is such an amazing experience. Just being underwater makes you feel like you’re in a whole different world. And the whole experience brings forth a bunch of challenges that you’re just not that used to on a day-to-day basis. As I reminisce, there are a couple of things from yesterday that are extremely important in diving, sometimes to the point of life or death, but they’re also really important in life.

• Procedures: it’s important to experiment with the way of doing things, and to clearly define the best way of doing them to ensure they get done.
• Checklists: I see these as procedural cheat sheets. Life is complex. Everyone has a million things running through their mind all the time. It’s normal to not remember everything perfectly. Checklists help us when our memory doesn’t. They help us be more efficient, consistent, and in situations like diving, for example, they reduce the chance of error, which can mean death.
• Teamwork: you’re always going to run into difficulty. Having a team is important because they are similarly equipped, have similar or complementary skills, can understand the challenge at hand, and can provide qualified assistance.
• Mindfulness: being present is important. Our minds often wander and we lose focus of the present moment. That’s when we can get agitated, emotional, and start acting irrationally. Remembering to be present, like the other items above, can prevent us from making mistakes, and just make things better overall.

I am very grateful for having been able to dive again. It was great to be under water, and be at peace with myself and the environment. We also saw some amazing fauna, including a couple of sharks, which are shockingly magnificent animals.