You never really know what you’re missing until it’s out of your reach.

I learned to SCUBA dive when I was young — early teens — because my Uncle Kevin made it sound like the most incredible thing a person could do with their time. Kevin has always been like that. Whatever I was into, he was into hearing about it. Whatever he was into, he wanted to share it. And what he was into was diving.

(Sidebar: Kevin and my Aunt Bonnie are my favorite aunt and uncle. I know you’re not supposed to rank these things but I am ranking them. Kevin has been one of the most consistently supportive people in my life and I have so many memories of him talking about diving when I was a kid — not in a “let me tell you about my hobby” way but in a “let me show you this entire world that exists” way. He made it feel like a door I was supposed to walk through.)

After I got certified he took me to Cozumel, Mexico for my first ocean dives. My first real ocean dives. Not a pool, not a quarry. The actual ocean. And it was everything he said it would be.

It’s been years since I’ve been diving. Years. And I think about it constantly.

There is something about being underwater that nothing else replicates. The peace of it. The weightlessness. You are neutrally buoyant and the world above you — the one with emails and doctors and insurance companies and all the noise of being a person — just stops mattering for a while. You’re breathing and you’re floating and you’re watching things move in a world that doesn’t care about you at all, and somehow that’s the most comforting feeling available.

I would describe the sound underwater as a loud silence. Because it’s not quiet. It’s never quiet. There are boats somewhere above you, there are animals, there’s water moving, there are other divers clanking around and breathing too loud. The ocean is full of noise. But because of the way sound travels underwater you can’t locate any of it. You can’t tell where it’s coming from. It’s everywhere and nowhere at the same time, and your brain eventually just files it all under “ambient” and lets go. That’s the silence part. Not the absence of sound but the absence of direction. Nothing is demanding your attention. Nothing is pointed at you.

When I was deep in therapy and we were trying to find my calm place — the mental location I could go to when everything got too loud on land — it wasn’t a beach. It wasn’t a forest. It was the tanks at commercial diving school. A twenty-foot-diameter water tank where we practiced. You just went down and hung out. Technically we were practicing for emergencies, learning to deal with equipment failures, getting used to the weight of the diving helmet on your shoulders. But mostly you were just… there. Suspended. Breathing. Existing in a place where gravity had taken the day off.

It was great. It was so great.

I miss spending a day playing in the water. Not enough to buy a boat — I’m not insane — but I think about diving a lot. More than a reasonable person probably should given how long it’s been since I’ve actually done it. There’s a version of my life where I dive regularly and I think that version of me is probably a little calmer and a little more grounded, which is ironic given that the whole point is to leave the ground entirely.

If you ever get the opportunity to try SCUBA diving, do it. Don’t overthink it. Just get in the water and breathe and let the loud silence do its thing. Your brain will thank you.