Divers

 Yesterday we went down to the dive centre after breakfast and our gear was already on the dive boat. Delana, our PADI instructor flashed us one of his rare smiles. “You’re divers now—I set up your equipment for you.” Will, in his briefing on the boat, said, “Ok, just head down as soon as you’re in the water—you’re divers now, so we’ll just meet at the bottom and go from there.”  John and Tanya, the lovely couple we’ve been diving with these last few days, smiled on the boat ride back in after the trip to the spectacular giant clams and mushroom shaped corals. “You’re divers now,” they said. “Welcome to the most fun club in the world.”

We’re divers now. People say it as a form of identity—as if it’s who we are, not just a thing we do. Identity sounds fixed in its way, and pieces of it are, of course: things like gender, race, class, religion, national origin and the various forces that shaped you as a kid. But other parts of our identity are as slippery and fast moving as the flashing fish we’ve been watching underwater this week, a rainbow blur and then gone.

Last year at this time we tried diving for the first time, but it didn’t touch my identity which was painted thickly over with the cancer treatment. My nearly bald head made me a curiosity at the resort, rendering the tank strapped to my back nearly irrelevant. This year, my curly hair masked my trip through chemo just 13 months ago, and the tattoo peeking out of my bikini stood out much more than the fading scars from the surgery. It was the wetsuit and tank that marked us in this little tiny resort. “You’re divers, eh?” people would ask us. I guess so, we answered, the diver identity as borrowed as the wetsuits and tank.

There are pieces of our identity people feel happy to talk about, and pieces that seem oddly not in good taste to mention. Funny how last year no one asked, “You’re just out of chemo, eh?” even though the odds of a bald woman being out of chemo (rather than choosing bald as a fashion choice) are probably about the same as the wetsuited woman being a diver (rather than just being extra cold). At our resort this time there was a woman in a rather-familiar looking hat that she kept on at all times; I figured she was just out of chemo. And there was a woman with a heavy scar on her chest where an IV port goes and I figured there was some kind of cancer treatment there, too. But I didn’t ask either of them. Cancer seems somehow a private form of identity, to be discussed in hushed tones.

Dying, too, seems like that. My uncle Tommy has been moved to hospice care at home now, where he has wanted to be, and there are updates from the family each day. Tommy had a great day—an Irish band visited and lots of friends. Or Tommy is really tired today and sleeping a lot. I’ve been sending him cheerful texts with pictures of palm trees and the inane sort of “wish you were here” messages. None of us are mentioning the identity of the dying. How do I talk to him about whether he’s afraid or in pain, whether he’s wishing for the end or wishing for a miracle? Does his identity shift from living and fighting to surrendering and dying? Does the identity of the hospice patient overtake all the others—father, brother, writer, Air Force officer? I have no idea.

But perhaps I am unprepared for even the slight shifts in the current of my life that seem to shape my identity. In January we moved from Paekakriki to Wellington, and I felt my identity shift with even that small trip. “You’re a city mom now,” my kids tell me. I notice that my sense of myself as a writer shifted when the second book was published; one book might be a fluke, but two books makes a line and seems to mark me (to myself at least) as a writer. Naomi is off to university soon, and that, too, seems like a looming shift in identity—I’ll be one of those moms of kids grown and gone, hurtling towards the empty nester identity which is likely to be ours for the rest of our lives.

How much of our identity do we choose, and how much is chosen for us by our circumstances? And even as I type this I see that our choices are all created by our circumstances and we are choosing from a small subset of all possibilities.  It is a privilege to take on the diver identity given how expensive the pursuit is; it is even a privilege to take on the “cancer survivor” identity when in the developing world this cancer would have killed me.  Who do I want to be next? What combination of choice and circumstance will create the palate from which I will paint this next portrait of my shifting identity? How do we make sense of the ways we choose and are chosen, we write and are written by the world?

Today the wind picked up in paradise and the dive tanks that got strapped on the dive boat weren’t for us. Alex at the dive centre told us how lucky we had been with the still seas and perfect weather, and we saw once again that we hadn’t even noticed the way circumstance had written our opportunities for us as we descended dive after dive into calm, clear waters. We had credited Chris, our instructor in Wellington, and Delana, our instructor in Fiji, for our own easy competence rather than the fluke of tides and winds that made our certification journey easier last week than it would be this week. And of course Chris and Delana have their fingerprints on our ease and competence. And Michael and I matter too in this picture. That’s always the way, I guess, with the slippery fishes of our identities.  It is the speakable and unspeakable parts of our public and private lives as well as the swirl of the atmosphere around us that gives us colour and shape.

As I teach leaders about complexity, I am continually reminded of it in my own life: the way chance and choice weave a tapestry none of us could have predicted ahead of time. The unexpected conversation over lunch. The gig I took at the last minute. The lump my fingers brushed over in the shower one morning.  The vague wish that got amplified into a diving certification class that took me to Fiji one still July day, winding my way through coral canyons 18 metres under the Pacific ocean. I have no idea where the winds and tides will take me next, which combination of events I choose and circumstances that choose me will thread into the tapestry of next. But a new set of possibilities was created with this trip and with the new colour—diver—that weaves into my future.