Do You Believe In Signs?

The other day at work, I was talking with the hotel concierge in the lobby, when an elderly guest approached.  After he had finished speaking with the concierge, he turned to me and told me that he had thoroughly enjoyed watching me teach scuba diving the day before.  He told me that he thought I was a very good teacher, because I possessed the right qualities for it: knowledge and skills in my subject matter, enthusiasm, and patience.  We talked some more and he told me his name was John and that he was himself a teacher of many years standing.  I thanked him for his compliments and I told him that they meant a great deal to me, as I was thinking of going into teaching formally as a high school teacher.  What he said to me next was the sign for which I had been seeking.      

For many of us, making tough decisions is a difficult process.  I know that at times, despite everything that my heart is yelling at me, despite all of its urges, I feel completely unsure and afraid of the consequences, afraid of the unknown that lies down the particular path I am considering.  Even if I know and understand the logic and rationale behind the decision that must be taken, I still feel a deep sense of trepidation.  When this occurs, I feel the need to seek out something illogical, something mystical, something spiritual.  It is as though some primeval sense demands it of me.  I start to look for something that will show to me the rightness of the decision that I am going to make.  I begin the search for a sign.

A sign.  It shows us the way to go, it tells us the direction to take.  Without them, we would quickly become lost.  Imagine driving down the highway and not having any sign posts to show you which exit you needed to take.  You could guess and you might be right, but until you turned off and tried one of the exits, you would encounter uncertainty and doubt.  Life is like this too.  Throughout our lives, we are taught to read signs of all kinds.  A smile means that someone is happy, dark clouds gathering on the horizon means rain, a feeling of thirst means we are dehydrated.  To get through life, we need to know the signs, to be able to read them, and we need to be able react to them.

For sometime now, I have had the idea of becoming a teacher running through my mind.  To tell the truth, it's been there for many years as an idle thought, perhaps nothing more than a curiosity, since I was ten years old.  More recently, it has begun to turn into something more, it has started to grow wings.  This is an idea that keeps on coming back to me, time and time again, it seems like I cannot rid myself of it and it cannot rid itself of me.  If I were to go through with the idea, it would mean a significant life change and a commitment.  It would mean turning my back on my current life and turning instead to something completely new - a path that is unknown and dark to me.  I am afraid of this idea because of what it means, but at the same time, I also believe that it is something that I must do, something important for my life.  To help me with my decision, I have been on the look out for a sign to show me the right way.

The other day at the hotel, John came as the bearer of that sign.  In those words that he spoke to me, I knew the rightness of the path that lies ahead of me.  We cannot create the signs, they have to come to us of their own free will.  There are days when we are desperate to find the answer for which we urgently seek and we see nothing.  Those are the times when we feel as though we have been deserted and left to our own devices.  Sometimes that is a sign in itself.  There are certain decisions that can only be made between you and your heart.  There need not be any other external factor involved.  Other times, we look and we are rewarded.  I remember a time when I was alone in Malaysia.  I had just separated from my partner and travel partner and we had decided to go our own ways.  I was travelling back to the Perhentians Islands to continue my scuba diving education.  On the boat from the mainland across the South China Sea to the islands, I felt lonely, sad and afraid of what was happening.  I can remember looking over the side of the boat, towards the bow to watch the white water that sprayed up as the boat cut through the ocean.  There, in the spray I saw small rainbows, brilliant colours of arcing light that just hung there, motionless, as if they had been waiting for me.  It was the sign that the decision that I had taken was the right one, I felt a sense of peace sweep over me, and my heart felt at ease.

Sometimes we misread the signs, we see only those things that only exist in our own truth of a situation.  How many times have I made the mistake of believing that a girl I liked very much and was giving me lots of attention, was attracted to me?  I figure that because of the attention, this girl must really be in to me, so I decide to ask her for a date.  The reality is that she is only being her usual friendly self and is this way with everyone.  I misread the signs because I saw only what I wanted to see, not the reality and the real truth of the situation.  I am completely unable to read women - period.  They remain a complete enigma and a mystery to me, but that is for a different post.

A sign reinforces our point of view and helps us to feel more comfortable with our decision.  Whether we like it or not, humans have a deep need to establish a spiritual connection, to believe that something exists that is greater than ourselves.  We are part of this great mystery of life, we are part of the miracle.  Signs hep us because they meet our psychological need for reassurance, that a greater power is willing us to go in a certain direction, that we are being helped along our path.  Maybe none of this is correct.  Perhaps it is all too easy to make the pieces fit, to look back with hindsight and to make certain things become the truth.  Would my life have turned out exactly the same if I had not seen the rainbows that day?  Perhaps it would, perhaps it would not.  It really does not matter.  All that matters is that I believe that life places signs in front of us to help us, to guide us, to show us the way that we need to go.

The other day at the hotel, John was the bearer of my sign.  When I told him that I had long thought of becoming a school teacher and that I was now seriously considering the idea, his words held meaning for me.  "It is your calling", he said.  And you know something?  I truly believe that what he said is right.  John is an angel, a messenger that came to me, that spoke the words that my heart needed to hear.  I do believe in signs, do you? 

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Reading The Signs Of Life

Life is full of signs.  Learning to see them, to recognise them and to understand them is a necessary part of the learning process of the walk along the path.  Heeding the signs, that is probably the hardest thing of all.  But heed the signs we must if we are to be rewarded with the miracles of life that lie along our path, waiting for us to discover them.  The other day, life showed me two signs and by reading them, and more importantly, by heeding them, I discovered two miracles.

Life is truly full of signs.  Some of them are simple, like seeing dark, heavy and threatening clouds on the horizon, usually means that rain is surely on the way.  When the leaves begin to change colour and fall from the branches of trees, then we know winter is coming.  These are two very simple examples of the signs of life, but they are signs sent to us by nature and therefore by the Creator of all things.  We know them and we trust them.

In the ocean the other day, during the first dive of the morning, I was leading my divers around the north end of the rock formation and dive site known as Los Sombreros.  The visibility in the water was very good for this area of the Pacific, around 15m (50 feet) and coming around the north end, there lots of schools of fish to be seen in the water.  The north end of Sombreros is always an interesting dive because here, the ocean floor drops down to 23m (75 feet) and the currents coming around the rock attract large number of fish.  Due to those conditions, this dive site offers some great surprises and this day would prove to be no different.  As I passed to the side of one such large school of grunts, suddenly and as one body, all of the fish darted away.  Something had got them very spooked and that could only mean one thing - a large predator.  Immediately, I swam out towards the fish.  My instinct told me that there was something out there, lurking out in the deeper water.  My instincts were not wrong.

As I scanned out through the water and across the sand bottom, cruising into my view came a large shark.  My initial shock led to surprise, which led to disbelief.  We have sharks here in the waters around Playa Flamingo and those are usually white tip reef sharks and nurse sharks.  White tips are easy to distinguish by their, well, white tips on the top of their dorsal fin and tail and by their overall shape and size.  This was no white tip.  Nurse sharks tend to hide away during the day time, preferring to seek refuge and sanctuary in holes under rocks and in sheltered channels.  To the best of my knowledge, neither of these sharks is usually a direct threat to so many fish and cause the panicked reaction that had occurred.  I noted the shape and the tail of this shark.  It was large, possibly 8 - 10 feet in length.  It never came close enough for me to get a great look, but I had seen enough of it to know that it was something out of the ordinary.  My gut feeling is that this was a bull shark.  The reaction of the fish leads me to this conclusion, as does the tail shape and the general view that I was given of it.  Bull shark sightings here are very rare.  This was a privilege to witness.

The second dive was at a rock pinnacle known as Dirty Rock.  Here, there is a large population of king angel fish, that act as cleaners for the manta rays, when the manta rays are in season (December - March).  The angel fish pick off the parasites that live on the manta rays and essentially, clean them.  On this particular day, as the group of divers came around the rock, I saw that there was a small group of angel fish on the wrong side - they always tend to be on the sheltered side of the rock pinnacle, and this is where the manta rays come for their cleaning.  Almost at the moment that I noted that to myself, this group of angel fish swam passed me, clearly with some intent.  I turned around and there behind me was an almost entirely dark grey/black manta ray, probably 10 - 12 feet in wing span.  A second miracle of the morning had occurred.

This blog post is not meant to be a post about scuba diving and the joys that this activity brings to my life.  I used these two examples to illustrate only how life places the signs before our eyes.  Instead, what is important are the signs of life and the ability to read them and to understand them.  You see, life shows us the way.  Whether that is in the oceans, the forests, or the deserts, the signs of life are there for you to see.  Learning to read see the signs, to read them and to comprehend their meaning, is a necessary part of the journey that we all make along our one true path.

I believe that the signs that you need to discover are littered throughout your journey.  If you pass one by and fail to see it, then it will come again later on.  Perhaps not exactly the same sign, perhaps not exactly in the same way.  A sign might be an overheard conversation, it might involve the meeting with someone new and an exchange of information, it could be as simple as the shape of a cloud drifting slowly above you head.  The signs are there, they always have been and always will be.  I know that the Big Guy gave me many signs on my own journey and by being able to read them, I moved my life on.  I was able to evolve my spirit, to learn the lessons that I needed to learn.  I'm also sure that I have misread or even missed completely other signs and I know that these will come again, when I am ready for them.

If you travel along the path too quickly, always in a rush to be some place, you will miss the signs that have been laid out for you.  Rather, take your time, look about you, see the world for that which it truly is and as you do so, then so too will the signs begin to appear.  And how do you know when the sign is the right one for you?  You hearts tells it.  And your heart is the best reader of the signs that there can ever be. Trust it. Listen to it.  Follow it.  Your path, your one true path is out there, just waiting for you.  But then, you knew that already.

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