slow your breath, never stop breathing

Although at this point in my life I’ve lived longer outside the Caribbean than in, I am fully 100% Trini. After all, I spent my formative years in Trinidad, and regardless of where my fairly nomadic family lived, every day I came home from school to a Trinidadian household. So Trinidad, and by some extension, the rest of the Caribbean, is where I feel most at home. It’s a huge part of my identity. The Caribbean is where I can walk down the street and never seem out of place. It’s where the flavours of the food and the rhythms of the music feel most familiar. And it’s where, when my feet enter the Caribbean Sea, I exhale most deeply.

This identity is a huge part of the reason I became a scuba diver almost 30 years ago. For the record, scuba diving is completely out of character for me — no one would ever describe me as a daredevil with a straight face — but I figured that learning to dive would be a stellar excuse to keep returning to the Caribbean. So I took a scuba diving course, and it turns out that once you know what you’re doing, diving is completely meditative. And this is because of the fundamentals of diving:

The first rule of diving is slow your breath. Because you have to conserve the air in your tank, you have to breathe as slowly as you can. Doing so also ensures you can maximize your time at death.

The second rule of diving is never stop breathing. Because of a myriad of alarming reasons, holding your breath at depth is extremely dangerous.

It’s not lost on me that these two rules — slow your breath, never stop breathing — are also marked characteristics of Caribbean culture. Life in Trinidad, and indeed, many of the islands, is slower. Folks take the time to breathe: we take the time to appreciate the food, our culture, the nature around us, every single day. In fact, we never stop doing this, even as we go to our jobs, take care of our families, and tend to our daily responsibilities. We take a beat, multiple times a day.

My plans for scuba to bring me back to the Caribbean to dive several times a year didn’t pan out: when I was a young mother, diving was impractical; now that our daughter is grown, any spare money we have tends to be used to travel to the UK to visit our English family (and while folks do dive in the UK, mark my words, I will never be one of them). And I must admit that since my entire career has occurred in the US, my life has been caught up in the faster pace of American life. But when things get overwhelming (and these days, it all seems overwhelming, am I right?) I try to remember the two rules of scuba (and Caribbean life):

Slow my breath. Never stop breathing.

So my wish for all of us this week is that we slow down.

Breathe.

Repeat.