I´d love to know how others found their passion
My uncle was a marine biologist and he worked at the university where I went to study. I had seen the ocean before on vacations but I grew up pretty much literally in the middle of nowhere in the Rocky Mountains and had only seen scuba diving on TV.
My uncle helped me get connected to the student union and arrange for a local dive shop to come and give lessons. 6 weeks in the university pool and 6 dives in open water. The course was given by a commercial diver who gave PADI lessons on the side. As a side note he eventually went on to become one of PADI Canada's bobo's.
As for me, I was a water baby. During school vacations my mother used to take us to the lake with my cousins, aunt and grandmother and our fathers would come on the weekends after work. My grandmother was a lifeguard in her younger years and she taught us how to swim. We would literally take our "morning dip" every day by swimming clear across the lake and back again. (it was a small lake but to a child the task looked daunting).
My first experience on scuba changed me forever. I had snorkeled before but my first time underwater able to breathe was instantly addictive. I couldn't get enough. I found learning to dive relatively straightforward apart from the struggle to dial in buoyancy control to where it needed to be, which is a common problem. It never bothered me, however, and I eventually became very proficient at it. I dove a lot with my uncle and his friends/colleagues to begin with. I was going to university so I couldn't dive more than once a week (thankfully they bankrolled it). I had a 60 hour study schedule so I could have every Sunday free for diving. When he died I nearly stopped diving but picked it up again a few years later after meeting some new people.
As luck would have it, I wasn't very good with women so aside from studying and diving my life didn't have many distractions. Sometimes I wish I could go back to that kind of simplicity.
Fast forward to today. I'm an instructor sharing the sport for the first time with others and helping them on their own journey of becoming the diver they want to be. I never set out to become an instructor but took a DM course together with some friends as an extension of helping out with rescue courses (something I've been doing since the mid 80's). I DM'd for a long time but eventually had the opportunity to take the instructor training and make my own mistakes instead of mopping up behind others. I found out that being the instructor isn't as easy as it looks from the "peanut gallery" but have committed myself completely to being the best instructor I can possibly be. At any point in time I'm always improving and feeling like my previous students deserved better.
My own diving these days is all, or pretty much all, technical. At least locally. On vacations I try to stick to the NDLs and I'm still as happy as ever to dive in groups and tag along with other (newer) divers. At some point almost everyone seems like a newer diver. I actually mentioned this to a friend of mine who is an instructor just last weekend. He's been diving for 11 years and has about 1500 dives. He's a good instructor and I've seen him grow up from a new OW diver to the confident and competent professional he is today. I even ask him for advice from time to time. I said to him, "that's a good start", which after the laughter and joking lead to me realizing that there is a state that goes beyond a "passion for diving" that starts to define your identity.
R..
