Face to Face With An Apex Predator

After 15 minutes of riding the waves, our boat's motor finally stops somewhere off the coast of O'ahu. It's not the one mile drop into the dark ocean beneath me that puts the fear of god into me – it's more what is in these waters. In about five minutes, I'm going to jump into the deep blue and swim with sharks.

The instructor gives us some last pointers before he hands us our fins. The other tour members are eerily quiet. Only nervous laughs cut through the silence from time to time apart from the waves that hit the boat. It seems as though we all wish this moment would go on for ever, so that we don't have to do what we voluntarily signed up to do. But our instructor destroys our not so well-guarded dream without mercy. "So, who's first guys?", he asks us. Not one hand is raised. It's school all over again: everybody waits for the other to take on the challenge. This time it's not a math problem on the blackboard, though. It's a dance with one of the ocean's top predators. The hands are still down. The passing of three seconds feels like an eternity in such a situation. But for me, my lowered hand is much more significant. By not raising my hand, I'm breaking a promise I had made to myself only a day earlier.

For the longest time, fear dominated my life. For almost everything I did, I had to overcome anxiety and fear – the remnants of not-so-fun past experiences. Even though these difficult times had been over for more than three years, it was still deeply ingrained in my psyche. The brilliant capacity of the human brain to remember can sometimes go against you it seems. I knew I had to get a handle on this tendency, so I promised myself to do everything that scares me. But when I made that promise, I didn't think "swimming with sharks" would be the first item on the menu.

I try to give away responsibility of my inaction to rationality. Who in their right mind would go and swim with sharks in their territory? Just about when I was about to wait for somebody else to bite the bullet, I remembered a talk of Simon Sinek that I heard long ago. In this talk, Simon shares a single trick how to turn anxiety into excitement. Since anxiety and excitement are feelings that are so close to each other, we can't always tell the difference. So, whenever you are anxious, tell yourself that you are actually excited. It's a simple positive reframing of the feeling with enormous consequences – because the moment I turn my anxiety into excitement, my hand points toward the sky.

I get up and walk to the side of the boat. I sit down right on the ladder that leads into the depths. I put on my fins. I take one last deep breath. Then I jump in.

What follows is pure ecstasy:

After getting myself out of the water, I still can't quite comprehend the surreal experience I just had. But what is clear to me now is that fear is much less frightening than its consequence: regret.

Everything good in life is on the other side of fear.
– Will Smith

DISCLAIMER: Despite common misconceptions, swimming with sharks is statistically very safe. We humans are a far greater danger to them than they are to us. Please protect these beautiful animals. Further information can be found at https://saveourseas.com/worldofsharks/.