Old Job Skills Reemerge

Tuesday, April 21, 2020

Several times over the past few weeks of being cooped up with my kids, I have surprised myself a little by thinking how similar the experience was to being deployed on a submarine. And now, I know for a fact that I am not alone in making such an observation.

Fellow former nuclear submarine officer Steve Weiner has written an interesting and engaging piece at Nautilus about that very subject. Aside from the description of Weiner's current morning routine, which reminds me of my own blogging habit, I particularly enjoyed the following passage:

Dive! Dive! (Image by Nicolas Häns, via Unsplash, license.)
Like a heavily watered-down version of a Buddhist monk taking solitary retreat in a cave, my extended submarine confinements opened something up in my psyche and I gave myself permission to let go of my anxieties. Transiting underneath a vast ocean in a vessel with a few inches of steel preventing us from drowning helps put things into perspective. Now that I'm out of the Navy, I have more appreciation for the freedoms of personal choice, a fresh piece of fruit, and 24 hours in a day. My only regrets are not keeping a journal or having the wherewithal to discover the practice of meditation under the sea.
Yes. That was something of a monastic existence, despite the close quarters. And, yes, it would have been nice to have learned meditation then: I'd been planning on starting an online course right before things hit the fan, in fact. That's going to have to wait, though, because the kids are young enough that the very idea of either attending to a lecture uninterrupted -- or of really clearing my mind -- is something of a joke.

So I'll look forward to doing that once this "deployment" is over. For me, that will be in the summer: Our governor cancelled the rest of the school year over the weekend.

My own memories aside, I highly recommend the piece to anyone who might be curious about what training and life at sea are like for an American submarine officer.

-- CAV

2 comments:

Dinwar said...

This parallels something a colleague and I were discussing the other day with regards to the virus. We're cleaning up a hazmat site (objectively toxic, the soil burns your skin on contact), and we've both got years of experience doing this sort of thing. The rules for PPE--gloves, masks, etc--that the CDC and WHO are recommending are rules we live by in our day-to-day lives. In fact, the are less onerous than what we routinely encounter. The fear that most people are experiencing is also the norm for us. After a certain point, one more invisible thing that will make you sick/kill you if you don't take precautions simply isn't something that gets you worked up; you default to established protocols. Even social isolation isn't as big of an issue, since geologists are used to living in isolation (hotel rooms if we're lucky, man-camps if we're not). I don't want to say that it's business as usual for us, but it's more a question of expanding the scope of established best practices than anything else--something we're used to as we move from site to site anyway.

As the article you quoted said, you also get comfortable with discomfort in this job. There's no way to be knee deep in toxic waste, watching an air monitor to ensure you don't die or explode, while heavy construction equipment operates next to you, during rain, and not be uncomfortable. You learn to treat these things not as catastrophes (which shut down your mind and make you unable to respond) but as problems to be solved (which engage your mind and allow you to discover solutions). You learn to take pride in your ability to overcome such problems. You also look for small things to enjoy. Doing work while listening to music, for example, or in my case having my son (6 years old) read to me in the evening. You do what you can to ensure you survive, and then you do what you can to enjoy life--because believe me, nothing is more poisonous than mere endurance. You can live for a week, maybe a month that way, but if you don't find ways to recharge mentally and emotionally you crash and burn, in the figurative and (nearly, in my case) the literal sense of the term.

Gus Van Horn said...

Yes.

Part of how I re-charged was by reading and keeping a journal during part of the time I had in my bunk.