Just breathing is not enough
Connecting the dots between Scuba and work
“It’s actually quite simple - bas saans lete raho (just keep breathing)”
This is a line in ZNMD, as a summary of a scuba experience, alluding to breathing as a way to becoming present. After one week of scuba, I don’t think just breathing is going to cut it. Neither for scuba, nor for any other thing.
First, let’s come to presence.
Being present is good for peak performance and happiness as well. But the truth is, most of us aren’t present most of the time (hence the self-help industry).
Why?
Logistics
One thing that adventure sports do really well is making you present. You’d literally be at the risk of death or serious injury if you are not.
Take Scuba, for example.
There’s so much going on when you’re diving by yourself.
You do your pre-dive checks. Then after jumping in, you check and control your buoyancy, air and a whole lot of other things.
The internal dialogue in your brain is more like -
“Am I breathing too fast? I decided I’ll breathe better this time so let me focus on that”
“Seems like there’s some water in my mask, let me clear it out.”
“Need to depressurise my ears”
“I think I’m still a while away from cramping my heels”
“Seems I’m too buoyant, let me deflate a bit”
It’s like your left brain is running a multi-variable iterative function at all times, making sure no variable is going out of bounds.
All that you care about in that moment is doing that dive well = avoiding any accidents. And that makes you completely present.
Well, almost all.
Beauty
This was 2014.
In my first scuba dive.
Amid a school of fishes, I saw an octopus, just pumping itself up in the air quickly as I neared. And that was one of the many moments that left me stunned from the experience.
10 years later, a week of 7 such dives has left me overwhelmed to the extent that no other adventure sport has been able to.
Because Scuba is unique for the kind of views it offers. The underwater world is so alien to us that such an experience literally jolts you out of your daily life, reminding there’s so much to see in the world. So once you are done with the functional survival checklist in your head, you remind yourself to enjoy the beauty around. And this beauty vastly elevates your presence.
That’s when your right brain takes over,
“Wow, what fish is this?”
“I wonder how these fish and corals interact?”
“What’s that big thing that moved?”
“What’s that tail coming out of the surface? Wow, that’s a sting ray”
And I love it when this happens.
In the first dive, my majority focus was on getting the logistics right. In the seventh dive, it’d shifted to the beauty part.
And I don’t think this is unlike most things in life.
You start with getting the basics right, for those provide the fundamental stability required to do other things. And then once you’re confident there, move on to exploring your curiosities or whatever you find beautiful.
In music, you start with the fundamentals to eventually make your own compositions.
In startups, you get to PMF, to be self-sustaining enough to eventually invest in moonshot projects.
Whatever work you do, it’s useful to divide into the logistics required to setup the environment well and then the core exploration that makes the work fun.
While this progression seems linear, it’s actually not. You don’t stop focusing on logistics to explore the beauty around. It has to continue along the way, just that it becomes a background process that you just tweak from time to time.
Scuba was a reinforcement that both these dimensions contribute to presence.
Presence
Presence = logistics + beauty
We want to maximise presence in whatever we do, and that can come from a good mix of logistics and beauty.
The logistics part makes you feel more present by making you feel safe / secure and ensuring survival. The beauty part makes you feel more present by enabling you to have fun via discovery and playfulness. And while the pendulum keeps swinging between the two, you need both to completely belong to something.
There’s something to be said about the nature of logistics vs beauty. Logistics is about system design, there’s a non-binary spectrum on which you play and incrementally iterate the system towards a better output. Beauty is often binary - you either find something beautiful or not1.
We see this confluence of logistics and beauty everywhere, from individual artists to companies.
Picasso and Leonardo Da Vinci focused on logistics (paint type, setting etc) so that they could create the environment to do their best paintings.
Jensen Huang mentions about picking hard problems that you love, but figuring out a way to make money along the way. (Note: not money as a goal)
Steve Jobs was great at combining both, which is why Apple as a company has been great at shipping insanely great products and acing supply chain.
So, just breathing only solves for survival. Yes, survival is important and needs to be solved first. But that’s not enough.
Logos and pathos.
Science and art.
Brain and heart.
Destination and journey.
So, don’t just breathe, also see new things :)
If you’re not present, it’s either because of a gap in logistics or beauty. How do you investigate? Will be covered in next part of this post, subscribe to get it in your inbox.
Whether you find something beautiful or not, depends on some combination of objective beauty (e.g. exotic flowers are beautiful) and also personal factors (including your curiosity)