Deep thoughts and big fish

I have found that as our travel extends for such a long time, our days settle into something of a routine, despite the fact that we are in a different place every week, and sometimes more often than that.  We discover our new place and find the markets and buy vegetables, we walk, we talk to the locals, we find interesting places to eat and visit, we cool down after sweating a lot, we swim, we read.  In the end, there is just living, where ever we are. 

 

We have recently been at several very pretty beaches where we have seen lots of fish and I have even swum with sharks! I am not a very brave person when it comes to sharks, as "Jaws" scarred me almost irreparably when I was younger and now I sometimes fear sharks in the freshwater lake at the cottage (I mean, what if someone dumped a shark, or it swam up a river, or something?), irrational as I know this to be.  However, I saw this great movie "Sharkwaters" about sharks and how they're becoming more and more endangered because people (especially Asians, unfortunately) fish them for their fins (shark fin soup).  Anyway, this movie instilled in me a great respect for sharks and their place in the ecosystem.  When we went snorkeling in Thailand, there was a shark infested area and I went and I swam and I SAW them SWIMMING NEAR ME and I hardly freaked out at all.  Then we went again here in Malaysia and saw some more and it was just exciting, really, with some fear, but mostly fun.  Nathan went out alone and swam through a whole school of sharks, so if he could do that, I figured that I could handle 4 or 5 of them.  Although these are not huge (wo)maneaters like they have in Australia, they are still 5 or 6 feet long black tipped reef sharks and respectably sharky to be quite recognizable and a bit scary for someone like me.  So I'm quite proud to be overcoming that fear, though I won't be going steel cage diving yet.

 

We have also seen quite a few sea turtles, one the size of a small volkswagen, which was nice and kind of exciting in a non-shark way, as the big ones are the old ones, and it's nice to know that they're still OUT there, you know?  The big ones tend to be quite calm around humans, and don't swim away, probably because they've seen so many of us slow, fin-less creatures flailing around on the surface and know that we can't catch them.  But when they get tired of you, it's flit-flit-flit and they are GONE.  They move so gracefully, but so quickly.

 

Watching the tides come in and go out and listening to the waves gives me time to think.  I am amazed at how much thinking I do when I have the time to do it.  I know that I've commented on this before, and perhaps I'm unusual in this sense, but I find that I don't really do much thinking when I'm in my day to day working life.  There is too much going on in the moment to think about who I am and what I believe and what I want to do with my life.  I can think about my job and my friends and my husband and my next meal and maybe a few deeper thoughts about my current book or some news article, but the deeper issues within myself often go un-scrutinized.  So I've been interested to have time to delve into some issues that I didn't really even know that I had.  And I think that I've gained some insight into myself and become firmer in my beliefs and perhaps even solved a few mysteries about myself.  It's very nourishing.  Like I am becoming more myself.  It helps, of course, to have Nathan to bounce things off of, who is ever supportive and insightful and willing to talk for hours about how I feel about

such-and-such a topic.  I am amazed at how much thinking along these lines that I HAVEN'T done.  But I seem to be doing it now, better late than never, and I'm certainly benefiting now, so it's all happening as it ought.

 

Hope all is well and that deep thoughts combined with sharks aren't two too disparate lines of thinking.

ACDB