Where Your Power Comes From

All that we do is touched with ocean, and yet we remain on the shore of what we know.

--Richard Wilbur

I felt like I had been zipped into a straightjacket as I made my way across the sand in a skin-tight wetsuit and into the sea at the edge of the shore. My face was muzzled within a mask. My in-laws, who write books on snorkeling in Hawaii, gave me instructions:

“You have to trust the mask.”

“Don’t bite down too hard on the mouthpiece.”

“You’ll float, you won’t drown. You can’t drown.”

“Keep your fins underwater.”

“Forget everything you’ve been taught about breathing through your nose. Breathe through your mouth.”

“The challenge is to feel comfortable trusting that you can put your mouth down and breathe through the tube.”

“Just relax.”

Why is that last one so hard?

I thought I would have a few minutes to get comfortable with breathing underwater. I didn’t. Off we went, toward the edge of the rocky lava lining the bay. The first thing I saw was a green sea turtle, and despite being terrified about not being able to breathe, I was hooked. The coral at the floor of the sea looks like lavender brains sometimes, and other times like a mountain covered by the most lush green trees imaginable. The spangled sun created illuminated diamonds connected by waving lines of light.

On that first day, I saw over 25 different kinds of fish. We used an app later to tally up what we’d spotted. Schools of bright Yellow Tang (look at the picture above--I saw that!), Black Triggerfish, Sea Urchins, Parrotfish, Butterflyfish and even a Bluespine Unicornfish (with spines as sharp as a surgeon’s scalpel). When we popped up at the end of an hour long swim, it was raining for thirty seconds, just long enough to cast a rainbow over the bay before the sun came back out.

We went every day for five days, and each time was radically different. On the second day, we swam into the depths and the ocean floor disappeared. Even though it doesn’t matter how deep the water is when you’re floating at the top, it is vertigo-inducing not to be able to see anything as a point of orientation. Nothing but beams of blue light divided by the rays of the sun. And I had to ask myself: why can’t you just relax and enjoy the not-knowing?

Partly it was because my husband and I run our own business, Science House, and despite trying to take a proper day off, work always chases us. Which is a good thing. Until you really, seriously, need to take a day off and not apologize for it. The day prior, we had worked a 16-hour day and canceled a day trip to see a volcano to meet the unexpected advancement of a deadline. In the aftermath, people would be responding.

The irony of this is that much of our work is focused on avoiding that exact problem. It is possible to get the work done, no matter how complex the work is, in a groundbreaking manner (and on time), if, and only if, teams are extremely smart about time management, communication and pacing. The world will not fall apart if you stop to watch tiny spherical creatures glow in the sea for a few hours. In the endless blue mystery of the ocean, I started laughing into my snorkel about F*ck That: A Guided Meditation, which had gone viral that same day.

The next day wasn’t so funny, because the swells were so severe that even the fish were having trouble swimming. Tossed around at the bottom of the ocean, they drifted together in strong currents. My mother-in-law and I held hands in the volcanic rocks along the reef. With every swell, my snorkel was blocked to keep water out--but it also closed out the air, making me feel like I might suffocate. It was impossible to swim, and it seemed like we were far from the shore.

“Your power comes from the downstroke,” she said. “Keep your fins underwater. And the ocean is strong, but so are you. You learn to maneuver. You’ll be fine. It’s okay.”

We held hands and made our way back to the beach. By the end I was completely relaxed. Well, maybe not completely. But enough. 

Remember where your power comes from.

And the ocean is strong, but so are you.

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Rita J King is the EVP for Business Development at Science House. She is a strategist who specializes in the development of collaborative culture by making organizational culture visible so it can be measured and transformed. She is a senior advisor to The Culture Institute in Zurich, Switzerland, and a Fellow at the Salzburg Global Forum. She is a Weizmann Advocate for Curiosity. She makes Mystery Jars, is the creator of Treasure of the Sirens, writes about the future for Fast Company and invents story architecture, characters and novel technologies for film and TV as a futurist for the Science and Entertainment Exchange. Follow@RitaJKing on Twitter.