Tag: fish

An Inexperienced Advanced Scuba Diver

Hamar WilliamsLeave a comment

Advanced diver reporting for duty. It’s amazing what the title of a certificate can imply. Having now dived a total of eleven times I am not advanced in experience or knowledge yet the title suggests otherwise. It does mean I can now dive to depths of thirty metres which is a vast improvement on the eighteen I’ve been able to for the last thirteen years. There are no guarantees but the plan is to dive more than once in the next thirteen. I’m a total sucker for courses and learning so at the very least I’ll be working my way through these as time goes on. I quite fancy doing some wreck diving, night diving, dry suit diving and the enriched air nitrox diving. Because I value life, and not just mine, and also because these are skills we should all have, I’ll do the rescue diver course eventually too. First before all of that I’ll just see what comes up and do some diving as the opportunity arises. If next years plans come together, judging by this year though I won’t hold my breath, which you should never do when diving by the way, anything is possible. The whole point of this was to allow for future diving and not just future courses after all.

There is a phobia called submechanophobia, which is a fear of submerged man-made objects like shipwrecks, submarines, buoys and other such things. I discovered this when discussing the sea with someone who suffers from extreme anxiety. I can appreciate the fear because when I’ve looked at images of sunken shipwrecks or submarines there is something eerily terrifying about them. Perhaps it’s the implication of death. The same exists for images of sudden drops that disappear into darkness or images of divers from a distance in the ocean with nothing around them for miles. There is something about these types of images that creates a fearful reaction, perhaps it’s some instinctive survival mechanism. When diving though it feels different. I can look over the edge of a drop that becomes nothingness but it isn’t necessarily scary. The mind is aware of possible dangers both rational and irrational but nothing like images manage to portray. When you are in and around it you understand how much is in the mind.

And that is one of the things that we can get from diving especially. Diving is not simply an adventure for the body but for the mind too, arguably more so. With all the water around and despite there being another person there, you feel fully in your own little bubble. Nothing else is going on. Nothing on the surface in our distracted little minds. You’re just under the water with the fish and the coral keeping yourself buoyant and focused. Even if you’re not keeping yourself focused you drift off into your surroundings, no opportunity to be anything but present. And for the last two evenings I’ve been so chilled out and not just from being tired or because I’ve had decompression sickness which I haven’t. Sailing and diving, I could think of worse hobbies and lifestyles.

Aeon

Hamar WilliamsLeave a comment

Now feels like a good time to plug a favourite website of mine. Aeon is all about ideas and when you read though the titles of the different articles they publish, the mind illuminates with excitement. They generally publish essays and short videos. The essays are usually three to four thousand words and of a high enough level not to be considered light reading. For this reason I can get a bit lazy as I know it will involve a certain amount of mind effort to read one. It is things like this that allow me to realise that my use of the internet doesn’t go much further than looking at football, politics, buying things and generally killing time and shutting off my brain. The internet is the greatest invention and has the potential to revolutionise society on scale not obvious since the printing press and I use it to kill time and shut my brain off. I know I’m not alone in this. Humans are ridiculous.

Aeon then involves a little effort, if you’re me, but it is well worth it. They used to also publish Ideas that were usually around the one thousand word mark which my short attention span was more suited to but they unfortunately seem to have done away with them recently. They publish essays on philosophy, science, history, psychology, law, nature, education and every sub category within.

For example this is an article on Ashoka Maurya who was an Indian Emperor over two thousand years ago. Seeing first hand the horror of warfare he creating ‘an infrastructure of goodness’ which also included the spread of the teachings of Siddhattha Gotama – the Buddha – and changed the face of the Indian continent in the process.

This is an article on the spread of pathogens throughout history, from The Black Death to polio, and how they’re generally spread silently by the seemingly healthy.

This article discusses free will and determinism, using our understanding of the sometime random actions of molecules to give some answers to this age old argument.

This is an essay on the concept of ‘hysterical women’, how women’s pain is often medically overlooked and undertreated but that ‘believing all women’ is not necessarily the answer and oversimplifies the issue.

This discusses how not only is privatising public services bad economics but also how it undermines our social and political bonds as a community.

And finally this is an article about how fish are nothing at all like us but that they are sentient beings and that they finally deserve a real place in our moral community.

Ultimately these are just a few examples of articles they publish and even then they’re only the ones I’m drawn to. There’s a little of everything for everyone. I mention Aeon because they’re not a massive publishing or news company, they don’t have adverts all over their website and they produce really interesting work. It’s online magazines like this that people need to be made aware of in these times of sensationalism and factual inaccuracy.

Just because I can I’m attaching a video of sea life in the Ningaloo Canyons off Western Australia. The video is on YouTube but is from Aeon, or at least that’s were I found it. There is also a video on the creation of the police force by Robert Peel in 1829 and what that has meant for society up to the present day. Enjoy the fish for now though.

What Is Your Price?

Hamar WilliamsLeave a comment

How much would it cost for you to….? Is a game played by adolescents and usually not a very pleasant one. Does everything have a price though? That is the question. I heard our time being discussed in this way once; to work out if your job or whatever it is that takes up you time was worth it. You must put figures on the various things you do so let’s say part of your job required climbing in drains or hurting kittens, what would you need to be paid to do that. You then throw in whether the time away from home is sufficiently recompensed, how much would it cost for you to not get home until after you children have gone to bed for example. In that case you are being asked to put a value on an element of raising the children. Do the benefits outweigh the costs. Ultimately that is how it equates to everything, do the financial benefits of climbing in drains outweigh the grim costs of stinking of shit. Something like that though we can get used to but can we put enough of a cost on never seeing our families and growing distant from our wives.

You can take it a step further. A fracking company wants to come into your community and hydraulically frack for natural gases. Now you know that will potentially cause damage to the local water and risk earthquakes, what cost would you put on those inconveniences. How about they offer you two hundred thousand pound, thats a decent sum of money, would it be suitable recompense for risking your water being polluted to the point you can’t even shower in it? It’s possible you may just use a fraction of that money to buy a rain water catcher and use that for showers, problem solved. How about if this company also pollutes the river which you use to catch your fish to survive on. What kind of price can you put on that? Is there a price to having one of your few sources of food and water damaged, life changing irreversibly. Does that price change when you have children and realise they’re not going to be able to catch the fish to survive off. At least you have cash in the short term, but really if it affects your whole existence then was that worth it.

If you had asked someone prior to the industrial revolution when work was less regimented and you did what was required while also having a higher level of self-sufficiency all round; whether they would sacrifice their time and freedom for the benefits the industrial revolution has created, there is no guarantee they would accept it. What is the price you put on you time. We work forty hours per week, if not more but for what. We may gain from many things but we also lose out on many others, all these things we have put or had a price put on for us. What price would you put on the continued destruction of this earth, and would it change if that was in regards to what price you put on that for the suffering of your children. If there is a price for anything then surely there is a price for that too. Can we really put a price on progress when it isn’t clear that we even know what it is.