Limbo & The Ancient Mariner

Got this photo set from Facebook's "Year in Review." It's weird.

After a month of being a constant presence at the local climbing gym, I have reached a limbo. The easy routes are now too easy for me while the hard routes are still too difficult for me.

I recently bought myself a snorkel set. An AquaLung Acapulco Mask and a Sonora snorkel. I bought it because I went free-diving with Lakbay Diva and I am totally convinced that I would want to keep at it. I still do but I realized that what I did last Sunday was not really free diving.

After watching Oshen’s video of “Island Jewel,” I felt that what I did was more like glorified swimming. Oshen and this girl was like swimming underwater with no fins, masks, or anything except their clothes.

But my incompetence as a swimmer cannot take away the experience I had. I have learned to appreciate the sea by being enclosed by it, by letting it hold my breath so I can have it back later.

I have learned to appreciate fishes and corals better because I was swimming at a depth that did not scare me. I experienced the weightlessness of floating over corals.

I like how palpable the water felt. The occasional bubbles were the only traces that we left in our descents and ascents—and they did not last very long either.

I want to think of my dive as a metaphor of going through life. It was so dense but the only traces that I would leave behind are bubbles—bubbles that pop as soon as they reach the surface.

Now this is me getting cheesy again. This morning, I have resolved to have more angst. But I cannot do it. Sometimes, I think that angst is just some people’s way of hiding their inability to do something.

Like, if I was really doing something, I would really not feel any angst because I know that I am doing something (even if I am not able to do everything).

Anyway, I have a new “theory” on why I want to try many things (a less morbid one, fortunately). I guess a try a lot of things because I cannot express myself through painting, writing, or dancing. My existence is utterly deprived of any art form.

In order to express myself, I try things that express or at least ease how I feel. When I feel furious, I take my mountain bike and ride recklessly down rocky single tracks. When I feel hurt or dejected, I go rock climbing because the physical pain replaces the emotional kind.

Disclaimer: me talking about pain does not make me emo. Being in pain is okay. It is a natural human emotion so it is natural for someone to experience it. What is not good is to dwell in it.

Sometimes being sad makes you smarter, though not in the genius sort of way. I did not say that, it’s Samuel Taylor Coleridge who said that in his poem called “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”:

A sadder and a wiser man, He rose the morrow morn.

I better stop here because I have been staring at the whiteness of this MS Word. I have reached the end of my rope. But I just remembered something that some hardcore guy (I cannot tell who) once told. He said something like, what’s worse than dying? Not having lived life at all.

I know that it sounds too Tumblr-ish, Hallmark-y (it’s just a cliché given a facelift to sound non-cliché). But I guess it’s true.