Women Who Travel

How Free Diving in Hawaii Taught Me to Slow Down in Life

Life lessons learned in Hawaii's therapeutic waters.
Makalawaema Beach in Kekaha Kai State Park WWT Free Diving in Hawaii
Alamy

I’d been free diving on Hawaii’s Kona coast for over two hours when my guide, Bullet, finally spit out his snorkel and told me that to go further, I needed to do less. Submerging deep into the ocean on a single breath requires physical discipline, and I’d have to become really still beforehand in order to slow down my heart rate. But there had to be a mental effort, too. I needed to slow my mind down so my body could follow. The way I was going, I was using more oxygen than I needed, and cutting each dive short.

My desire to do as much possible, as quickly as possible, goes far beyond one snorkeling session in Hawaii. Even though I’m from Southern California, I feel like I was designed for my current home of New York. I have trouble sitting still. My mind is never quiet. And while I love to complain about the stress in my life, nothing fuels me quite like it.

A lot of these pressures come from my relationship to work, which has gotten more intense over the past few years as my ambitions have grown. I take on as much as I can, calling everything an opportunity. I chug coffee to meet deadlines, I stay up late, and I hungrily ask for more even when I know that I can’t reasonably take anything else on.

It’s a quality that I've never thought to question much. That is, until stress began taking a physical toll. Last year, my throat started to feel tight almost daily, which led to countless 3 a.m. Google searches and two New York City physicians gently telling me my symptom was stress-induced. I lost sleep over my growing to-do list, which led to more coffee, and then more throat tightness. The worst part was that nobody else was asking this of me—the pressure to do more was all self-inflicted.

Until that trip to Hawaii, I hadn’t realized how far my work-related stress had seeped into every other part of my personal life—including travel. I tell myself I make the most of my trips, but the truth is, I just can’t say no. I want to squeeze everything I can out of every destination, and I end up working overtime to enjoy it.

My first few days in Hawaii were no different. Even the timing spoke to my need for a rush: 30 hours of travel from New York City and back, for a four-day trip on the Big Island between Christmas and New Year’s. But I’d spent a lifetime wanting to go there, and had recently become fixated on the idea of spearfishing—borne of a love of seafood and the ocean, as well as a fascination with the women around the world who have dedicated their lives to the tradition.

As my taxi driver from the airport sped along the empty highway to the hotel, past a tar black, hardened lava moonscape, I was already doing the mental math of the time I had, divided by everything I wanted to do. I could feel my throat tighten. At one point he motioned to our right, where the sacred Mauna Loa volcano sat veiled by the evening’s darkness, but I couldn’t see it.

Over that first day I tried to do everything you're expected to do at a luxury Hawaiian resort: I had a plate of rich ahi benedict for breakfast; took a dip in the infinity pool; and went for a walk on the beach. But it all felt like the prelude to the main event. I just wanted to grab a spear and go spearfishing so I could tick it off my list.

Mauna Kea beach on Hawaii's Kona coast.

Getty

I headed to the hotel’s onsite Surf Shack, where they let me down gently—they didn’t offer spear rentals, nor spearfishing lessons, to guests. I could, however, do just about anything else, including free diving. So I booked up my next two days with activities, and quickly came to know everyone at the Surf Shack by name. That’s how I met Bullet, my snorkeling guide, who immediately explained to me how you catch an octopus with your bare hands (grab its head, and bite between the eyes to paralyze it). There was also Pii, who ran the turtle program, and taught me how to catch black ama crabs on the sea wall with just a bamboo stick and some thread, before salt-curing them for dinner or releasing them back into the ocean. My surf instructor, Nainoa, told me, as sea turtles came up for air in the water around us, that he’d be spearing all the fish for his dad’s wedding the coming weekend.

As I bobbed in the water with my different guides, all of whom had been raised by the ocean in Hawaii, I noticed how, for the first time in a long time, I was slowing down. I began to see that I’d been moving so fast that I’d been completely missing the golden reality I was living—both in Hawaii and at home. The Big Island pace of life seemed so slow. Certainly too slow for me. But I realized my pace back home was equally extreme—and it wasn’t working that well, either.

On my last day, I paddled to a nearby cove with Bullet to get in one final sunrise free dive. As the tiny outrigger canoe floated on the surface, I followed Bullet 15 feet down, the only noise around us the haunting moan of whale songs. I noticed that every time he went up for a fresh breath, he’d pause for a few seconds, floating face down with his snorkel poking above the surface, his hand on his stomach, before slipping back under to explore.

Given how much I was struggling to keep up, I decided to follow Bullet’s lead. I placed my hand on my stomach, forced my brain to shut down for a second, and finally felt it. All of it. My breathing, my heart rate, and how often I let my mind cripple my body. I always justify my stress by saying it’s fueling me, but there’s a cost. When I let the stress and pressure mount, I sacrifice the clarity of calmness and spend so much time worrying about what’s next that I lose the present. When I dove down, following Bullet as he wove his way around reef formations, I touched the sandy bottom, staying down longer than I ever had.

It’s hard to stay calm when the world around you never slows down. A few months after I returned to New York, the city shut down in an effort to temper the spread of the coronavirus. Quarantined inside my sardine tin–sized apartment and increasingly stir crazy, commanding that calm I found in Hawaii is a challenge all over again. But when the to-do lists start playing on a loop in my head, or the uncertainty makes my throat tighten, I return to that place. I lay my hand on my stomach, I recall the sun reflecting off the blue surrounding me, and I breathe, slowly, deeply. For just a moment, I’m weightless again.