As a child growing up in a mill town in New Hampshire, the ocean was a place I loved to visit, most often at beaches in the cold waters along the coast of Maine. It was a place of exhilaration and mystery, experienced at the water’s edge.

That began to change in my teenage years. Inspired in part by the adventures of Jacques Cousteau and other explorers, I became scuba certified. My first descents beneath the waves, while limited to local waters, shifted my perspective from horizon to habitat, and offered glimpses of a larger, more mysterious world that I wanted to better understand.

The next transformation came unexpectedly during my first job out of college, working for a governor in Maine. In 1977, US marine jurisdiction was extended by 200 nautical miles, and I found myself at the intersection of public policy and ocean stewardship. Suddenly, the ocean was no longer just a place of wonder. It was an immense and largely uncharted domain entrusted to our care. We were asked to make decisions with limited knowledge, on behalf of vast living ecosystems we were only just beginning to comprehend. My perspective shifted from fascination to responsibility.

Soon that responsibility, paired with curiosity, became a pathway for exploration. It has carried me to some of the world’s most extraordinary seascapes including the Galápagos Islands, Palau, Raja Ampat, Palmyra Atoll, Fakarava, and the open waters surrounding Bermuda. Each place was distinct, yet connected, like chapters in a single, unfolding story of life on Earth.

Amid these experiences, another shift occurred. Descending into these waters no longer felt like visiting. Being immersed in these remarkable living ecosystems – with their captivating atmosphere of movement, balance and time – created a quiet sense of belonging, learning, and being within the ocean’s ‘knowing’. They revealed that journeys into the ocean are not only outward, into its vast and luminous depths. They are also inward, into the mystifying waters of the human spirit. They call on us to explore, to dare, to engage more profoundly, to go deeper than is comfortable. To move beyond the role of observer. To understand that we are all crew members on this spaceship called Earth.

Now, the ocean feels less like a destination, and more like a way of understanding that teaches without instruction, reveals without proclamation. It invites us to align ourselves with the rhythms of nature, to understand that we are part of it, to recognise wisdom in its balance, and to appreciate awe, not as a fleeting emotion, but as a true compass.

I’m grateful that this awareness is now something that I carry with me… a quiet sense of belonging to something larger, with a deep responsibility to move through the world accordingly.

This is how this short essay appears in the special Oceanographic publication, The Innerview