Have you ever wondered about the lives of each person you pass on the street, realising that everyone is the main character in their own story, each living a life as vivid and complex - and, to them, as important - as your own?
Which is what I did as I floated in that beautiful warm-water pool at our Aquatic Centre, enjoying the constant 34 degrees, and feeling sorry for that elderly lifeguard endlessly walking round and round the pool, more absorbed in his own thoughts than in what was going on in the pool.
Which is why it took me almost as much as a faked drowning to attract his attention to strike up a bit of a conversation to break both his and my boredom. "Have you been a lifeguard all your life?" I asked him.
"Oh no", he answered, suddenly awoken from his own reverie, "I used to be a saturation diver for over thirty years." A saturation diver! I had known of them from my time in Burma where my employers, the French oil company TOTAL, had drilled for offshore oil, but I had known nothing about them. Hours later, after I had come home again, I googled for it:
| "A saturation diver is a professional deep-sea diver who uses a technique called saturation diving to work for weeks at a time in pressurized, high-pressure environments. This method involves breathing a mixture of helium and oxygen and living in a pressurized chamber on a support vessel, where they are only decompressed at the end of a long work period, which can be up to 28 days. Saturation divers perform tasks like oil rig maintenance, pipeline construction, and salvage operations in the marine and offshore industries." |
What an unusual, if not downright dangerous job for which, as he had told me, he used to get paid US$1,300 A DAY at a time when that was still real money! What personal tragedies, what acts of folly had occurred between those years of incredibly high earnings and his current basic salary for endlessly walking round and round the pool?
Each of us has lived a life as vivid and complex as our own. All it takes to find out about it is to ask, "Have you been a lifeguard all your life?"
