Open Eyes

7 years ago I went to Thailand and learned scuba diving. What doesn’t sound like anything extraordinary or very unique was the start of something special for me. Little did I know, that it would change my life forever.

I have admired the ocean and its creatures since childhood, but back then, in Thailand, it was the very first time I could actually dive down below the surface. As I didn’t grow up or ever live by the sea, I didn’t get to spend much time by or in the water. But at that very moment in 2017, as the water surface closed over my head, I suddenly became part of the world that I had only known from pictures and screens until then.

I never believed I could ever accomplish something like becoming a scuba diver, but I threw myself into it and it changed everything. It didn’t change in the sense that something completely new was created, the change was rather that I could see myself again as I have always been. I’ve always had an obsession with marine life. Whales, sharks, rays, and almost every other marine animals have been my companions throughout life for as long as I can remember.

7 years ago, this part of myself surfaced again and all it took was a single breath through a regulator and the turquoise blue Andaman Sea around me.

The following years I spent exploring my rediscovered passion, but most of what I saw and read was about the devastating state of our oceans and its creatures and the immense ignorance of the fact that human life depends on healthy waters – healthy above and below the surface. For someone who lives in a Eurocentric world, it’s easy to ignore that fact. We usually can’t see the terrifying impact of our actions, and when we do, we intend to close our eyes and shield ourselves from every inconvenience that might question our way of living. As I did myself for far too long. On one hand, it’s what we leave behind, that useless amount of waste and pollution, and on the other hand it’s all the things we take. We purposely destroy the earth we walk on, pollute the air we breathe, contaminate the waters our lives depend on and we kill our fellow species in such senseless and horrific ways. This is where it became personal for me. Seeing the world I love so much vanishing before my eyes, simply because of human actions made me not only mad but also reevaluate my own priorities and way of life.

I’ve been working constantly for 20 years now, fought my way through years of financing education and livelihood by myself, and had a thousand jobs just to keep my head over water. After many years I finally got a decently paid and secure job, but the only thing that changed was, that now there was more money to buy stuff. The hamster wheel had blinded me after all these years to what I had once loved so much and what was so important to me. 

7 years ago I opened my eyes behind a diving mask and started seeing again. Since then, I have looked at and evaluated all the things that make up my everyday life and realized that much of it had no real meaning to me. So I started to get rid of those things and also behaviors.

For 7 years now, it has been a constant back and forth between tossing familiar behavior patterns and learning new ones, falling back into old habits, and moving forward to something I didn’t even know what it was. The only thing I always knew for sure was, that I wanted to be surrounded by the creatures of the sea, and at best show their beauty, importance, and endangerment to others. And maybe, on the way, find a life with fewer boundaries and more ocean.