Under water

Fantastic day out to an ocean aquarium. On a weekday. A friend and I skyved off and went looking at fish, turtles, and other amazing creatures of the deep.
The centre was a maze of darkened corridors with dramatically lit tanks in which swam, slept, drifted, breathed, ate, and waved languorous fins, tentacles and legs, a whole world of beautiful, ugly and verging-on-mythical beings.
It was strange, gazing in on them, living their private lives. Like Big Brother for marine life.
We live in parallel worlds, human society and the undersea community, in elements in which the other couldn’t survive.
In water of the depth they’re happiest in, we couldn’t survive without diving equipment, and then only for a limited time.
In the air that we need to breathe, they would die.
But here, we were separated only by a wall of glass.
Were they observing us, as we were observing them?
As we passed from one room to the next we noticed a woman leaning against the wall, looking down, not seeming to look at the fish. I thought perhaps she was tired and taking a break.
It was dark, if you weren’t looking towards the light.
A bit further on, while we were heading for the ‘ocean bed’ deep-water section, she approached us.
‘Can you help me? Only I’m having a really bad panic attack and I can’t find a member of staff …’
She was trembling and sweating. Out of her element, as surely as a fish out of water. For someone suddenly afflicted with claustrophobia, the place was a nightmare.
‘I’ve been trying to find the way out but I’m going round in circles.’
Thank God, the centre was designed so that visitors could go out the same way they had come in, and it only took a few minutes, linking arms with her, to find the route out of the dark.
Immediately we reached an open light area, above a flight of stairs down to the exit, she was all right and insisted she didn’t need us to go with her any further.
I guess everyone has times in their life when everyone else seems to be in the light, enjoying themselves, in their element – and you are in the dark, afraid, disoriented, and seemingly without help.
And it’s not easy to ask for help, for exactly that reason – that everyone else seems to be okay.
That’s not the reality, of course. There isn’t a human being on the planet who doesn’t know what fear is – come to that, there isn’t a fish or a creature of the deep, however scary-looking or apparently invincible, that doesn’t find itself at some time pushed out or at risk.
We went into an area where there was a huge open tank with sharks and stingrays and mega-size eels swimming around with coloured fish and giant turtles. They had obviously been selected for their compatibility – nothing was eating its fellow residents.
But the stingrays – fatal to human beings as well as to fish, if their tail-sting touches them – had to be specially fed, at feeding time, with scraps of fish held right up to their mouths on the end of a pole.
Lethal though they can be if disturbed or threatened, they would starve to death if they were left to take their chance with the food thrown on the surface of the pool. They are too gentle, too graceful, we were told, to compete with the determined lunges of the other creatures.
It’s incredible to think God knows the element every living creature needs to live in, in order to survive. Some fish live near the surface, some deep, some on the ocean bed, and they couldn’t take living at each other’s depth.
And he knows what each of us human beings needs - what we need in our unique individual life and in our communal life.
He knows what makes us panic, what feeds our spirit, what starves us, what threatens our stability, when we would be bullied or overlooked. He knows when we can’t cope, even in an environment that suits all the people around us.
He knows us. And even if everyone else was doing swimmingly, and you were in some dark place and nobody knew what the problem was and you couldn’t get out by yourself – he would know it, and the minute you asked for help, a lifeline would be held out.
We’re so safe, in his environment. We just can’t survive outside it.