![]() ![]() This may not seem like a logical first step into the world of boat ownership/liveboard operating It isn’t!Īnd the arbitrary way that we made this decision still makes me question my sanity. A liveaboard diving boat in the Coral Triangle!īut not just any boat, we settle on the idea of a traditional wooden sailing boat build by local tribesmen on a beach somewhere in Indonesia. Then a friend, Cecile, joins the search, and the notional “business”, as partner and she raises the idea of liveaboards and Indonesia. Whatever the reason is, I start looking at dive centres for sale, some even come complete with attached bars and beach frontage but none really tick the boxes. Then in December 2015 something changes an epiphany.Įxactly why, I can’t say, but maybe it’s the milestone birthday in a few years, or just simply the realisation that there was still the unfulfilled dream that somehow gnaws like an unscratched itch. All this time I’m still continue with my “normal” job, albeit now in SE Asia, and I’m still an AOW, diving regularly around the region. Sometimes it comes to the fore, always with the same catalysts namely, vacations, around sunset on a beach after a day’s diving with a cold beer in hand. ![]() I’m sure that every recreational diver has had the same dream. But this is how and when mine started.īetween 19 life goes on, marriage, 2 wonderful children and divorce, but throughout it all there is still the dream nestling somewhere in the recesses of my mind. Discover.” Mark TwainĦ months later I’m doing my AOW in Comoros and two things happen, firstly the diving is spectacular and I fall in love with diving and secondly, and probably over a beer, an idea forms, the dream of “doing something” with diving, perhaps owning a dive centre with an attached bar on a beach somewhere. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbour. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. “Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. It was new, interesting, the water was warm, and I obtained my PADI Open Water certification. It’s their wrongness that kept these ideas alive.By sheer coincidence, this story starts twenty years ago in 1997, when I had just become an expatriate in Dubai and decided to learn to dive. ![]() And would we have remembered “gather ye rosebuds” without the odd mistake of the “ye”? Probably not. If you look that passage up online, the ending thought is usually left out (even I forgot this part):Īnd yet if it hadn’t been wrongly translated as “seize” would we remember that line now? Probably not. That’s not the kind of man that Horace was. Don’t freaking grab the day in your fist like a burger at a fairground and take a big chomping bite out of it. Pluck the cranberry or blueberry of the day tenderly free without damaging it, is what Horace meant–pick the day, harvest the day, reap the day, mow the day, forage the day. What Horace had in mind was that you should gently pull on the day’s stem, as if it were, say, a wildflower or an olive, holding it with all the practiced care of your thumb and the side of your finger, which knows how to not crush easily crushed things–so that the day’s stalk or stem undergoes increasing tension and draws to a thinness, and a tightness, and then snaps softly away at its weakest point, perhaps leaking a little milky sap, and the flower, or the fruit, is released in your hand. Seize the day would be “cape diem,” if my school Latin serves. “Carpe diem” doesn’t mean seize the day–it means something gentler and more sensible. Today I was reminded of this passage from Nicholson Baker’s wonderful book, The Anthologist:īut here’s the thing. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |