Notes from 30 meters below Raja Ampat.

The first thing you lose at depth is the instinct to narrate. There is no signal down here, no one to tell, no running commentary in your head to filter what you're seeing through. For the first few minutes your brain reaches for the narrator anyway, finds nothing, and — after a while — gives up.

That's when the dive actually begins.

The reef does not care about you

Raja Ampat is sometimes called the last unbroken reef on earth. I don't know if that's technically true, but it feels true when you're in it. A moving wall of fish that closes around you and doesn't register your existence. A manta that passes four meters away and doesn't tilt a wing to acknowledge it.

There is something profoundly sane about being ignored by the place you are in. In a city you are addressed constantly — by ads, by notifications, by other humans' expectations of what you are for. Thirty meters down there is no such address. You are a slow bubble-emitting creature visiting a world that organized itself for other reasons.

What attention feels like when it's cheap

On land, attention is the scarce thing. Everyone is bidding for it, including your own anxieties. You learn to parcel it out, to keep some in reserve, to protect it.

Underwater, attention costs nothing, because there is nowhere else for it to go. You cannot think about your inbox. You cannot rehearse a difficult conversation. You cannot plan tomorrow. The only thing to attend to is the thing in front of you — the rhythm of your breath, the angle of the current, the particular blue-green of a coral you will not be able to describe tomorrow.

I think this is what people used to mean by "rest."

The small gift

The strangest part is what you bring back. Not insight — I'm suspicious of anyone who comes back from a trip with insights. Something smaller. A recalibration. For a few days after, the volume of normal life feels a little lower. People's concerns (including your own) sound a little more provisional. You remember that you are a creature before you are a role.

This is, I think, one of the better things Indonesia gives its people. A lot of very large ocean, very close to where we live, patient about teaching the same lesson to anyone willing to come down and listen.

I keep coming down.