A Message from a Manta Ray

I stared into the dis­tance until my eyes watered from the glare on the water, until the tops of my feet burned under the scorch­ing sun. It was impos­si­ble that I was here, a mir­a­cle to be talk­ing to the ocean again.

It almost feels friv­o­lous to enjoy myself these days. To be hon­est, the idea of a vaca­tion seemed more exhaust­ing than excit­ing. But the things cur­rent­ly tying me to “my real life” are the very things I des­per­ate­ly need­ed a break from.

So I sat and stared, wait­ed for inspi­ra­tion, guid­ance, some sign that liv­ing is more than just sur­viv­ing. The sound of the crash­ing waves brought with it my favorite line from Shawshank Redemption. “Get busy liv­ing or get busy dying.” 

The very moment the line came to me, a giant, slimy bird erupt­ed from the depths, sus­pend­ed momen­tar­i­ly in the gleam­ing sun, and crashed back into the water, leav­ing a shin­ing, sil­very path in his wake.

It took my brain a moment to catch up. Not a giant bird, but a man­ta ray. The exact totem I need­ed. No oth­er crea­ture can go with the flow with such effort­less grace, glid­ing about as they do with open, eeri­ly human-look­ing smiles to catch micro­scop­ic plankton. 

Jamaicans call them the eagle of the sea; I could be for­giv­en for ini­tial­ly mis­tak­ing this giant crea­ture for a bird. They are some­times called dev­il­fish, but only because their enor­mous fins – which can reach over 25 feet in length – are shaped like horns. Though these giant ani­mals are often con­fused with stingrays, which have a barbed tail, man­ta rays are docile, del­i­cate, and in no way dan­ger­ous to humans.

Manta rays are the very essence of self-aware­ness. They are the only fish that we know can pass the mir­ror test. The abil­i­ty to rec­og­nize one­self in a mir­ror has been doc­u­ment­ed in pri­mates and ele­phants, but nev­er in fish, until we stud­ied man­ta rays, which have the largest brain-to-body ratio of any fish. 

When sci­en­tists placed the rays in a tank with a mir­ror, they repeat­ed­ly moved their fins and cir­cled in front of it, but did not social­ly inter­act with the mir­ror in the same way they do when they see anoth­er ray. This sug­gests the rays noticed their reflec­tion mov­ing when they moved. They also blew bub­bles in front of the mir­ror (Google man­ta ray mir­ror test videos for some tru­ly adorable footage). The fre­quen­cy of these move­ments was much high­er when the mir­ror was present in the tank than when it was absent.

And prob­lems? While the manta’s biggest con­cern is tiny par­a­sites, noth­ing is bet­ter at shak­ing them off. The beau­ti­ful, acro­bat­ic dance I wit­nessed was a man­ta ray shak­ing itself rid of par­a­sites. And if they are injured, man­tas regen­er­ate cells quick­ly to heal, the very pic­ture of resilience and renewal.

The omen isn’t lost on me.

Shake it off.

Struggle less.

Flow more.

That’s how I will know myself, know the next best step. That’s smooth sail­ing in action.

I exhaled, for what seemed like the first time in a long time. A real exhale, noisy and shaky, a let­ting go, a promise. Later, I learned that the word man­ta is trans­lat­ed in Hawaiian as two breaths. Yes, of course it is. The inhale is noth­ing with­out the exhale. We can­not keep tak­ing in wor­ry and oblig­a­tion and think­ing – so much think­ing – with­out releas­ing it as we glide on.