On the Pleasure of Knowing Nothing and the Capacity to Remain Astonished
There's something liberating about starting from absolute zero, where you can't even pretend to have experience. No reputation to defend, no expectation that you should know what you're doing.
I have a healthy fear of the sea. It's not somewhere you can hang out for long before you die of exposure, a lack of oxygen or some predatory animal.
I used to surf, sail and swim, but when a friend suggested spearfishing, I put it off for years. I couldn't imagine myself doing it. Why would I want to be out in the currents, looking down into the depths, diving beneath tonnes of water amidst God knows what?
Eventually, I relented. We went for a snorkel together, and it was a disaster. Water up the nose, swapping masks, fiddling with straps. Not much snorkelling was done at all. Did I mention this was at night?
Now I felt obliged to face those niggling fears. He lent me some gear so I could practise. Just snorkelling, looking around and exploring, with minimal breath-holds.
I was conscious that I was quite literally out of my depth. I imagined getting tangled in a rope, swept away by a current or let down by my own body, unable to return to shore before hypothermia set in.
So I went practically every day for a month and soon began supplying the industry with my credit card. The fear began to feel like another bit of kit to enhance my safety rather than a wall to my own explorations.
There was so much going on down there that I wanted to share it, so I bought a camera too. Every creature I captured revealed how little I knew. And so began an obsession to document and learn firsthand, like some late-to-the-party Jacques Cousteau.
Three months on, I've clocked up well over 100 hours, doubled my breath-holds and found myself sharing facts I didn't even know I wanted to know. Previously, all I knew was the name of a thing, if that, but nothing about the thing itself.
Cuttlefish have three hearts, but why? How do they maintain neutral buoyancy, and why is their blood blue? Octopus eyes can rotate to keep their pupils level with the horizon. Horses, I realised, have a similar arrangement. And an octopus can taste what it touches, using arms that work on the same principle of muscular hydrostatic control as our tongues.
Every answer reveals another question. Every how leads to another why.
The more I learn, the more I realise how much I've overlooked. Not just the obscure or elusive creatures, but the most ordinary inhabitants of the coastline. Fish I've seen a thousand times without giving them a second thought suddenly become subjects of fascination.
I hadn't even appreciated that the seasons reveal themselves underwater just as they do on land. At the beginning of summer, the seabed is lush and vibrant with new growth. Over the months, all this flora weathers, blooms and becomes parasitised. Before you know it, half the seabed is littered with seaweed debris, like a tree-lined park in autumn.
The curiosity cuts both ways. I hadn't realised that if I sat quietly on the seabed, quite a few species would come over to investigate me. The observer becomes the observed.
Needless to say, I can't bring myself to take up spearfishing. It's far too much fun just watching these things and learning about them. I feel the habituation runs in both directions.
My friend, to his credit, has forgiven the conversion. I'm now a valued dive partner rather than a burden, and we venture further afield, confident in one another's abilities.
But there's something else I've begun to appreciate about knowing nothing.
Most of us spend our lives accumulating knowledge and experience, becoming competent at what we do, gradually developing an understanding of how the world works. Somewhere along the way, we begin to mistake recognition for understanding.
That's a fish. That's a bird. That's a tree. Job done.
We recognise the thing, assign it a name and file it away as known. A familiar name tells us remarkably little about the extraordinary mechanisms operating beneath it.
There's a name for this: the illusion of explanatory depth. We feel we understand a zipper, until we're asked to explain how it works. The problem isn't familiarity itself, but the strange confidence that familiarity amounts to understanding.
There's also an unexpected comfort in being ignorant. I don't need to be an expert. I don't even need to be particularly good at it. There's no shame in asking elementary questions when you have no pretence of knowing the answers.
Of course, I've already started developing expectations of my own. I want to find new creatures, capture better footage and come home with something interesting to investigate. Even a hobby pursued for the pleasure of discovery can acquire its own little burdens of achievement.
But the greatest excitement still comes from encountering something I don't recognise, or seeing something familiar for the first time in the wild. That sudden realisation that here is another thing I know almost nothing about, followed by the irresistible urge to find out.
The ignorance isn't an embarrassment to overcome. It's the beginning of the reward.
But being a beginner is a circumstance. Having a beginner's mind is an attitude.
I happened to find myself in an unfamiliar environment, surrounded by things I knew nothing about. The ignorance was unavoidable. But the same opportunity exists in the things we've known all our lives, if we can resist the temptation to consider them understood.
The sea hasn't become more extraordinary in the last three months. It was always this extraordinary. I simply hadn't been looking closely enough. How much else have I dismissed as familiar without ever really understanding it?
Sometimes we just need to look again at the world we think we already know.
