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    The Uncertain Sea: Fear is everywhere. Embrace it.
    The Uncertain Sea: Fear is everywhere. Embrace it.
    The Uncertain Sea: Fear is everywhere. Embrace it.
    Ebook45 pages38 minutes

    The Uncertain Sea: Fear is everywhere. Embrace it.

    By Bonnie Tsui

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    About this ebook

    Bonnie Tsui, the bestselling author of Why We Swim, a Time magazine Must-Read Book of 2020, writes about finding strength in the face of fear and uncertainty. Enlightening and inspiring, The Uncertain Sea is just the story most of us need right now.

    Fear and uncertainty—emotions we’ve become all too familiar with this past year. From the pandemic to political upheaval to the recession to lurking environmental disasters, we’ve been battered by one unfathomable event after another, with more to come. How do we handle the emotional fallout from such traumas? How do we bounce back?

    Bonnie Tsui tackles these big questions in The Uncertain Sea, her insightful look at fear and the many ways people handle it. Plagued by the anxiety she herself was feeling in 2020, she looked for guidance from an old friend whose very career would make most of us shudder. Ron Elliott is an underwater photographer specializing in sharks—in particular, the great whites of the Farallon Islands, off San Francisco, notorious for being one of the sharkiest spots on earth. Over the years, Elliott has had numerous close calls and was even attacked by a great white in 2018, nearly losing a hand. Yet still he returns to the water. Tsui wondered how Elliott managed risk and fear and what his resilience might teach the rest of us.

    In her 2020 bestseller Why We Swim, Tsui—an accomplished swimmer and surfer—examines the cultural and biological aspects of our relationship to water. In The Uncertain Sea, she uses open water—and what lurks beneath the surface—as a metaphor to explore our psychological responses to the unknown. She draws on scientific research to better understand how and why fear manifests itself in humans, and frankly discusses her own deep-seated anxieties. She takes a thoughtful look at the movie Jaws, the blockbuster that cemented sharks in our collective unconscious as the symbol of all that is dangerous and scary. As a result, sharks—animals that are crucial to the food chain and present a statistically insignificant threat to people—have been threatened by overhunting. The fact that shark-liver oil is being used in developmental COVID vaccines that could save millions of lives adds to the dark irony of our shark mythology.

    Throughout her narrative, Tsui turns back to her friend Ron Elliott, who, Buddha-like, finds his quiet center in the sharks’ cold, forbidding “living room.” He is comfortable with being uncomfortable; in fact, that’s how he finds his strength. It’s a lesson we all should learn.

    “We are imperfect beings, teetering on a razor’s edge between reason and emotion,” Tsui writes. “What does resilience look like? Why do we embrace risk? My very human answer: We risk, sometimes a lot, so that we can seek joy.”

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherEverand Originals
    Release dateMar 2, 2021
    ISBN9781094412924
    Author

    Bonnie Tsui

    Bonnie Tsui is a longtime contributor to The New York Times and the author of American Chinatown, a San Francisco Chronicle bestseller that won the 2010 Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature. Her most recent book, Why We Swim, was published in April 2020; it was a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice, a Time magazine Must-Read Book of 2020, an NPR Best Book of 2020, and is currently being translated into five languages. Her first children’s book, Sarah and the Big Wave, about the first woman to surf Northern California’s renowned Mavericks, will be published in May 2021. She lives, surfs, and swims in the Bay Area.

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    Reviews for The Uncertain Sea

    4/5

    56 ratings6 reviews

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    • 5/5
      Short and easy read, you wont want to stop. Written clearly, it is a beautiful analogy of ocean life versus humans and the world today!
    • 5/5
      Brilliant! Addresses our humanity & out current tenuous world situation.
    • 5/5
      This book/audiobook taught me the fundamental of fear in a short and wonderful analogy that everyone can relate to.
    • 5/5
      Very timely and poignant. And great writing!
      Fear and sharks, the pandemic and the environment, it is all there and all connected.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      Another amazing work by one of my favorite authors!! Go Bonnie! Very poignant words in the midst of a frightful global pandemic...

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      Wow. Just wonderful. I know Bonnie so I am biased, but this short story can take one to a tranquil stasis Jackson Browne called a peaceful easy feeling. A place I tried to get to for many years but only experienced for moments. It's what AA calls 'getting it' and is a calming state of mind without alcohol or drugs. It's the essence of why I think AA people say they are thankful to be a recovering alcoholic. It's the transcendent state of being alive and present in the world yet aware and involved without fear being in charge. This short story will save lives. Thank you so much Bonnie, I think you've got it.
      Jan Van Sickle, March, 2021

      1 person found this helpful

    Book preview

    The Uncertain Sea - Bonnie Tsui

    FOR NEARLY TWENTY YEARS, RON ELLIOTT made his living as a commercial sea urchin diver in the Farallon Islands, those isolated, sawtooth crags thirty miles off the coast of San Francisco, out in the yawning blankness of the open ocean. It was a solo pursuit, gathering urchin in this part of the Pacific. Eventually, it got to be even more so, when he was the last year-round diver left. But he liked it that way.

    To keep himself entertained during long dives, and to have a little something to show his family, Ron took a camera along and filmed what he saw: pairs of ling cod hovering protectively over their clutches of eggs; octopuses foraging and flushing colors; sea lions chasing one another, then playfully nosing up to the camera. The twenty-foot tendrils of jellyfish trailing off into the inky dark.

    What he was most interested in seeing, though, was the sharks.

    The Farallones are where large numbers of great white sharks take up residence in the fall and winter months, feasting on seals and sea lions—the high-fat, high-calorie pinnipeds that colonize the islands’ rocky, windswept shores. A single juvenile elephant seal can sustain a white shark for a month. Outside of the sudden, episodic violence of a kill, the sharks swim calmly and methodically along the seafloor, visiting spots where they’ve previously found food.

    Ron loved the meditative quality of drifting through and observing the marinescape. What’s the undersea equivalent of being a fly on the wall? Maybe it’s a krill in the current.

    Like the sharks, Ron spent most of September through January in the Farallones. It became his adopted home. Being alone with the sharks, in the silence and solace of the sea, quieted his mind. Immersion below the waterline put him in a trance that he welcomed. He wasn’t averse to sharks as much as he was to his own past. He’d been wild in his youth—out of control, he admitted, unable to get a grip on his scattered brain. His poor mother, Ron’s wife, Carol, told me more than once. He was a handful back then. He looked for things to calm him down: alcohol and surfing, then AA and diving. Where others might pull a 180 upon seeing a shiver of sharks, he found comfort swimming alongside them, in the hush of their native environment.

    He found that he liked documenting marine life more than he liked picking urchin. He tapered off from fishing around 2005, when local processors disappeared and transporting his catch became difficult. By 2010, with the waters surrounding the Farallones officially closed to most fishing, Ron was well into his career as the islands’ premier underwater filmmaker, specializing in sharks. (My description; Ron hates superlatives.) He was fifty-nine years old.

    Once, I brought him onstage before a big audience to talk about his life among the sharks. People were electrified by his intimate footage of the predators swimming calmly around him like he was just part of the furniture. The first question from the crowd was, of course: Aren’t you afraid out there? I’ll never forget how he paused, looking into the darkness at the nearly three thousand people in the

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