When water speaks, listen

A year ago I found myself staring at water and examining my relationship with it. I was standing on a diving board several meters high, in front of a fixated audience, and on the verge of performing the final dive of my athletic career. As I stood there, I realized I had been waiting for this moment for a long time. For four years I had practiced six days a week for four hours a day, and here I was, at its culmination. I exhaled, then inhaled, then smiled; allowing myself to feel what it felt to be content.

People used to ask me what I thought about before I did a dive. They often presumed it was fear and yet it very rarely was. Diving teaches you to concentrate inward, never allowing your body to be a step ahead of your mind, forcing you to be totally and wholly present. As I stood staring at the pool, I realized it had never been a battle between the water and I; the water was constant, my head and mind had been the abstract. I looked at the water, thankful for the lessons it taught me and grateful for the pain it put me through. I was overwhelmed with a sense of calm, my adrenaline counterbalanced by peace — a form of enlightenment.

And yet today, exactly one year later, I find myself again gazing at water, this time filled with rage, I beseech the silent sea to give me answers. I am sitting on a ledge in Tripoli, Lebanon, 20 miles from the Syrian border. I think of how I am so close to my friend’s children and wife in Aleppo and how he misses them daily; I think about the guitar my other friend left behind when he fled his hometown, and I think of how the smell of saltwater lingered on the clothes of the refugees.

I sit there, encircled by darkness, save for the neon lights of a sheesha cafe to my left, the lights of the whizzing cars behind me, and the white foam from waves crashing into the rocks; my head dizzied in thoughts.

I think of what water means to me now. I think about the night I sat on the shore of Lesvos with my friend from Damascus and together we watched the waves ebb and flow. I think of how the moon created a spotlight on the water and I think of how he took out his phone to take a picture: “I need to document the moment I found beauty in the thing that I was so afraid of,” he had confided. “I was so scared on the boat. I thought we were going to drown.” I had sat there, unsure of what to say, rocking back and forth with my hands hugging my knees.

I think of how several minutes later he cringed and his body trembled when a plane flew over our heads, “I can’t help but jump; I’m waiting for the bombs to drop.” He laughed lightly, perhaps to fill my silence, and rolled up his sleeves to expose arms covered in tattoos.

A car honks behind me and I jump out of that memory, readjusting my position on the ledge and refocusing my mind on the meditative movement of the waves. And so I stare, in a faceoff between the ocean and myself, caught in a one-sided interview where I plead for answers and am met only by muteness.

I hate the water now, how it swallows lives and determines at random who floats and who sinks. I reflect on a conversation I had with a friend at the refugee camp. “Perhaps it is safer for these people to be taken by the sea; perhaps they will find peace there that they would never have found in this life,” she had suggested. She said this at a moment we were silent, save for tears falling down both our faces, both grappling with the news that over 40 people had died in separate shipwrecks on one of the deadliest nights we had worked. “Maybe,” I said. But I didn’t agree; nobody should enter a better life by ending their last in such misery and fear.

And as I refocus my mind to my current state, I dwell on how caught I am in the past. I think of the peace I felt a year ago and the naseous I feel presently. As I stare into the water, I can hear it softly whispering to me: “Have I not taught you other lessons? Use the knowledge I have given you as a light and the pain that you feel as a catalyst.”

Perhaps then I have found another form of enlightenment, one where my eyes have been opened and I must only choose how to act.