It's a Mental Thing

This is a very short little video Lee took on his iPhone last week, at one of the ports-of-call on our cruise.  It was an odd (but very appealing) little community called Costa Maya, in the very southern-most part of Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula.  Not too long ago, it was a very sparsely populated stretch of jungle and coastline; pretty much the only settlement was a fishing village with a population of about 400.  About six or eight years ago, the government built a cruise-ship port, with an attached shopping/entertainment complex.  Then, in the fall of 2007, the category 5 Hurricane Dean hit the area pretty hard, closing the port for a year, and doing a lot of damage to the surrounding topography.  The port has re-opened, but it’s kind of strange–you can buy all the t-shirts and jewelry and liquor you want, or you can swim in a really beautiful pool, but that’s about it.  There are plenty of cruise-line-operated excursions into the jungle to see various things, but we really wanted to just hang out on a beach, so we ventured into the fishing village.

The road is a mess (when we asked our cab driver when the government was planning to repair it, he said never), and it looked to us like some people are still living in tents.  The trees were fascinating–bleached white tree trunks, twisted from the prevailing sea breeze, were massed along the coast, completely bare, like an army of skeletons.  They were filled with flocks of snowy egrets and other birds I didn’t recognize.  It was beautiful, in a lonely, haunted sort of way.

We had done a little digging online before the trip, so we had a destination in mind:  a little four-room hotel on the beach, with lounge chairs and a restaurant.  They said if we ate lunch there, we could hang out in their lounge chairs all day.  Lee’s discovery of their free wi-fi was an added bonus, as was the guacamole-to-die-for.

But my real agenda was some snorkeling.  I love to snorkel almost as much as I love to scuba dive (I should’ve gone with my early instincts, and been a marine biologist).  So after lunch, I put on my mask and snorkel, gathered up my fins, and waded into the water.

If you look carefully, in that video you can see the fringe of breakers that mark the reef, at the outer edge of the cove.  That’s where I wanted to go–fish love a reef.  So I flopped down into the water, wrangled the fins onto my feet (there’s nothing–nothing–that makes me feel clumsier than putting on a pair of fins), and struck out for the reef.  The water was maybe 15 or 18 inches deep, so I crossed my arms behind my back to keep them from dragging in the sand.  It was pretty silty and sandy, so I couldn’t really see anything at all.  I just kicked in the general direction of the reef.

If you look at that video again (you’re probably getting tired of it, but at least it’s short), you’ll notice that as you move away from the shore, there are some lighter-colored areas, and some darker-colored areas.  I started off in a light-colored (sandy) area, but after a few minutes of kicking and peering into the murk, I hit a dark spot–a bed of seagrass.  Seagrass is  . . . well . . . exactly what it sounds like.  It grows on the ocean floor, mostly in shallow-ish water, I think.  It creates dense clumps and beds.  Lots of sea creatures seem to like seagrass, but honestly?  It gives me the willies.  It’s so dark, and you can just imagine what kinds of things could hide in there, waiting to reach out and grab an unsuspecting snorkeler.  I’ve seen lots of barracudas hovering over beds of seagrass, and I know intellectually that they aren’t interested in my, but they look so ominous–my heart always beats a little faster when I see one.

So when I came up on that wide bed of seagrass last week, by myself, I turned parallel to the shore, thinking I could swim around it and find a clear channel out to the reef.  No such luck–the only way was to go through the seagrass.  But the water was still so shallow; I’d barely be able to clear the tops of the grass.  The idea of brushing against it as I swam along, my bare arms and shoulders and legs dipping into that dark, sinister tangle of plants, was just too much.  I tried to talk myself into it; really, I did.  But my fear took hold, and it proved to be stronger than my logic.*

I had come up against a barrier that was all in my head–a mental obstacle.  Yes, there was seagrass, but it wouldn’t really have stopped me, if I had been determined enough.  What held me back was my own mind, playing tricks on me.  It happens to all of us, from time to time.  We let our fear keep us from doing something that we very much want (or need) to do.  Back when Lee was first diagnosed with heart disease, the lifestyle changes that we knew we needed to make seemed scary and impossible.  Any kind of big change can seem insurmountable–but very few challenges really are.

Sometimes it’s just a matter of telling the scared part of your brain to shut up, so you can get past the seagrass to where the beauty is.

*For those of you wondering, I never did screw up enough courage to get myself out to the reef.  I wish I had.