DEEP BLUE WONDERS

For writer and journalist Julia Baird, the daily ritual of swimming in the ocean provides a peaceful sanctum where her mind is free to wander and disconnect. While underwater, she also experiences awe, and here, outlines the health benefits of feeling muc

Writer and journalist Julia Baird outlines the health benefits of experiencing awe and feeling much smaller than the world around us.

THE FIRST TIME I saw a cuttlefish swimming in the wild I was astounded by how prehistoric and alien it looked. Cuttlefish are astonishing creatures with heads like elephants, eight arms that they occasionally splay then join together like a trunk, and small bodies ringed with thin, rippling fins that look like a silk shawl. They glide across the ocean floor, changing their colour to match the surface underneath them, – from gold above sand to brown and red over seaweed – and even their texture – from smooth to thorny – blending in with the background so effectively that they are often only noticeable when they move their silken frills.

Cuttlefish are not just otherworldly in appearance, consider these facts: their pupils are shaped like the letter W, and it’s speculated that cuttlefish eyes are fully developed before birth and that the young start observing their surroundings while still in the egg. Their blood is colourless until exposed to air, when it turns blue-green. They have three hearts and a doughnut-shaped brain that is larger in proportion to its body size than that of any other invertebrate. The cuttlefish bone – that white oval-shaped object you often see washed up on beaches or in budgerigar cages – is actually a thick, calcified internal shell that helps cuttlefish control flotation, and separates them from fellow cephalopods such as squids and octopuses. There are four or five male cuttlefish for every female – an excellent ratio in my view – but all live for only a year or two.

For me, cuttlefish are symbols of awe. After my first sighting, I was charged with a peculiar kind of electricity for hours. I regularly spend the winter admiring them, then mourn when the spring tides cast their light white bones onto the shore. When I dive down to swim alongside cuttlefish, as I have several times this week, the world slows to the rhythm of ruffling skin. Seeing them regularly in the bay at the foot of my hill has given me an unexpected insight into awe. If I had guessed that spying them gliding along reefs could be part of my daily ritual, I would have devoted myself to ocean swimming decades ago.

These days I begin every morning I can by diving into the sea, swimming with a group at Sydney’s Manly. Our mob can’t quite be called a squad, or a club – we’re just a big motley crew who meet at seven in the morning at our local surf club and swim 1.5 kilometres across a protected marine park. We formed a decade ago when a group of women plucked up the courage to swim out past the headland to the next beach, even though they knew sharks will always be there, somewhere, though, of course, they leave us alone. There are a few showoffs and competitive blokes in the swim now, and sometimes it gets a little crowded, but mostly, it’s for all shapes, sizes and levels of fitness. Some wear enormous flippers and wetsuits, others swim in just cozzies and budgie smugglers right through winter.

Something happens when you dive into a world where clocks don’t tick and inboxes don’t ping. As your arms circle, swing and pull along the edge of a vast ocean, your mind wanders, and you open yourself to awe, to the experience of seeing something astonishing, unfathomable or greater than yourself. For swimmers, it is often sightings of dusky whalers, seals, dolphins, turtles, cuttlefish, fevers of rays or schools of fish. For others, joy can be found in all kinds of things in the skies, outside windows, on footpaths, mountains, backyards, rivers, night skies.

Studies have shown that awe can make us more patient and less irritable, more humble, more curious and creative – even when just watching nature documentaries – and it can ventilate and expand our concept of time. Research by psychological scientists Melanie Rudd, Kathleen Vohs and Jennifer Aaker concluded that “experiences of awe bring people into the present moment, and being in the present moment underlies awe’s capacity to adjust time perception, influence decisions, and make life feel more satisfying than it would otherwise”.

Research conducted by social psychologist Paul Piff and his colleagues suggests that people who regularly feel awe are more likely to be generous, helpful, altruistic, ethical and relaxed. In one case, people who spent time staring up at towering eucalypts were more inclined to help someone who had stumbled and dropped a handful of pens than those who had not. In other words, when dwarfed by an experience, we are more likely to look to one another and care for one another and feel more connected.

Several of my swimming friends have stopped taking antidepressants: they call the ocean ‘vitamin sea’. Wallace J Nichols, author of Blue Mind, a book about the benefits of being in or near water, says water has the ability to meditate you. A study published in the British Medical Journal in August 2018, posited the theory that swimming in cold, open water could be a treatment for depression, which is again science starting to catch up with what we already know. Why else would I, a night owl, find myself rising before dawn to jump into black seas if it wasn’t an addictive high? The study was based on the experience of a 24-year-old woman who found that a weekly swim in cold water allowed her to stop her medication. The authors were uncertain why this happened – one suggestion was that the water worked as an anti-inflammatory or treatment for pain. For me, though, the explanation that rang true was put forward by co-author Michael Tipton, who said: “One theory is that if you adapt to cold water, you also blunt your stress response to other daily stresses such as road rage, exams or getting fired at work.”

The awe found in daily swims does bring a sense of connection, as does the companionship. In an era of increasing disconnection, digital-only relationships, and polarisation of political views, it is great to sit among such a varied group of people – with most of whom you only really share one thing – and talk rubbish and riptides. I walk down the stairs at the south end of the beach each day knowing that I will see dozens of beaming faces before I put in a toe in the water, and that each of them knows how lucky they are to have and to share this experience.

“As your arms circle, swing and pull along the edge of a vast ocean, your mind wanders, and you open yourself to awe, to seeing something astonishing”

The importance of daily contact with people – the old fashioned face-to-face kind

– has been well documented by researchers, including American sociologist Robert

Putnam, who lamented the decline in

America of social organisations such as churches, unions and community groups in his 2000 book, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. In recent years, the number of people who say they have very few or no confidants or close friends has rocketed, with worrying implications for our wellbeing: greater isolation and loneliness have been linked to increased risk of chronic illness and dementia, alcohol abuse, sleep problems, obesity, diabetes, hypertension, poor hearing and depression.

A sense of community can also make us more resilient. One of the world’s longest studies of adult life, the Harvard Study of

Adult Development, followed subjects for

80 years from 1938 – and found that social connection and relationships are the single greatest predictor of health and happiness throughout your life. Why then don’t we all do more to foster a sense of community? It’s hard when you’re shy, or blue, or sick, or struggling – my own instinct is often to close the shutters and be quiet and solitary, too. But that instinct is not always the healthiest one. In order to endure, to survive trauma or even just to stay afloat when life threatens to suck us under, we need to know we are not alone.

It’s not just relationships with friends and family that count: connections with people who live on the same streets, work in the same offices or ride the same trains as us also matter. A 2014 study by researchers at the University of British Columbia found that even interactions with ‘weak social ties’ – like members of a sporting club – were significant. Students who interacted with more classmates than usual on any given day reported being happier, for example.

Swimmers and surfers concur: if they don’t have the chance to jump in the ocean before work, they are twitchier, less settled and less focussed than on the days when they do. After having major surgery a few years back, I yearned to slip back into the sea. When I finally rejoined the swim group, I practically danced for the rest of the day. As my shoulders began to grow stronger, so did my mind. Swimming is a form of meditation. As the amazing Diana Nyad, who in 2013, at the age of 64, became the first person to swim from Cuba to Florida without the protection of a shark cage, told The New York Times, swimming is the ultimate way to deprive your senses: “You are left alone with your thoughts in a much more severe way.” Sound is diminished, yes. But, for me, ocean swimming is the ultimate way to expand my senses – of sight, space and subdued sounds – and heighten my awareness. Afterwards, through my working day, images of thrashing waves and gliding turtles flash through my thoughts. An ocean swim is also a reminder of the vastness of the sea and all it contains. We spend a lot of time in life trying to make ourselves feel bigger – to project ourselves, occupy space, command attention, demand respect – so much so that we seem to have forgotten how comforting it can be to feel small and experience the awe that comes from being silenced by something greater than ourselves, something unfathomable, unconquerable and mysterious.

This sense of smallness seems to be a key to a true experience of awe, and in turn to linking with others. Attempting to provide an academic definition of awe, social psychologists Dacher Keltner and Jonathan Haidt wrote: “Two appraisals are central and are present in all clear cases of awe: perceived vastness, and a need for accommodation, defined as an inability to assimilate an experience into current mental structures.” They pointed out that architects of religious structures have always attempted to engender a sense of smallness, and consequently awe, by designing buildings on a grand scale: soaring ceilings, domed canopies, enormous columns, vast stained-glass windows.

In one study of American and Chinese people, Keltner found that after experiencing awe, people signed their names in tinier letters. He told New Scientist that he believed the reason for this is that “awe produces a vanishing self. The voice in your head, self-interest, self-consciousness, disappears. Here’s an emotion that knocks out a really important part of our identity … I think the central idea of awe is to quiet self interest for a moment and to fold us into the social collective.”

This is also what we sense when we swim in the sea and stand under the stars. We become small. When we shrink in importance, we become better at living with and caring for others. And we become more content.

Fortunately, cultivating awe does not have to mean daily ocean dives or annual trips to see the northern lights. One of the more surprising findings of recent research is how commonly awe can be found: in museums, theatres, parks, ponds, while listening to a busker, or even, surprisingly, in micro doses, while watching a commercial or reading a story. American social-personality psychologist Amie Gordon found that on average people encountered something that inspired awe every three days, such as “music played on a street corner at 2 am, individuals standing up to injustice, or autumnal leaves cascading from trees”.

Today, scientists are trying to measure awe by goosebumps. In an increasingly awe-deprived culture, when we are more likely to get lost in our screens than in the woods or public galleries, when we hedge our children’s explorations with our anxieties and fears, it seems increasingly vital that we deliberately seek such experiences whenever we can. The good news is that they are very often all around us, in every corner of nature.

This is an edited extract from Phosphorescence: On awe, wonder and things that sustain you when the world goes dark (Fourth Estate, $32.99) by Julia Baird, out now.

“We spend a lot of time in life trying to make ourselves feel bigger – to project ourselves, occupy space, command attention … so that we seem to have forgotten how comforting it can be to feel small”