Holding onto a sense of wonder

The man before me in Singapore is a descendant of Poseidon, Captain Ahab and Robert Shaw's Quint. Sea salt runs in his veins. A blue whale once breached beside him. The water tells him stories. The wind for him is a living thing.

"I can look at the water," says Russell Coutts, 60, quietly, "and I can read the wind moving across the water like a road map."

Listening to him, a great sailor, must be somewhat akin to sitting across Buzz Aldrin as he speaks about space. They see dimensions to the planet we don't and read nuances into the natural world in ways we can't. "If I took you out," Coutts continues, "and looked at the water now, I could show you just by this slightly different ripple patterns, the strength and direction of the different wind."

Coutts is a five-time winner of sailing's America's Cup but I'm most curious not about his racing but his clan. I grew up, maybe like you, with 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea beside me, my dreams speckled with pirates and Homer's Sirens singing in my head. Sextants were intriguing, maps were mysterious, the Rime of the Ancient Mariner was too long and Captain Haddock was a hoot.

The sea was vast, dark, unknown and full of the groaning ghosts of old wrecks. I saw the ocean and the theme music from Jaws played in my head, till a free diver once told me of the infinite silence below. No phone rang in the deep. Arthur C. Clarke once wrote "how inappropriate to call this planet Earth when it is clearly Ocean". Indeed 71 per cent of this globe is covered by water and so little we know of it.

It's why I like different tribes and look for their representatives, for they open doors to foreign worlds that lie beyond our suit-tie-sushi-please planet of sameness. Cave divers, poets, dancers, surfers, naturalists, the voices they hear aren't the ones we do. It's as if in the great programming which takes place upstairs, they were coded uniquely.

A uniform world is dull and different tribes offer themselves to us as an education. As time passes what we do not know actually seems to increase. Curiosity, I keep reminding myself, is a necessary flame and age must not blunt wonder. Jane Goodall, the conservationist, has never lost hers. I saw an old video last week on YouTube of her - then 80, now 88 - where she rises to her feet to demonstrate to the interviewer the excitement of chimpanzees who are anticipating food.

Goodall spoke the language of chimpanzees and all tribes have their own customs and dialects. A young commercial pilot spoke to me last week about "greasing a landing" and "runway grooving" and I was spellbound. Fighter pilots are their own sub-species, as anyone who's spent late nights in the company of Tom Wolfe's The Right Stuff and Craig Nelson's Rocket Men: The Epic Story Of The First Men On The Moon can testify.

Nelson writes that Nasa's "biggest celebrities, its combat-test-pilot astronauts, were notoriously laconic, epitomised by the story of the fighter pilot on his radio (where the cardinal rule is to only transmit absolutely crucial information) who kept shouting that he was about to be shot down: 'I've got a MiG at zero! A MiG at zero!' Another Navy man cut in to say: 'Shut up and die like an aviator'."

Who are these people? We might inhabit the same planet and yet live in separate worlds. We see life through different lenses. We even live in different airs. Up in the heights of Everest, writes Mark Synnott in The Third Pole, climbers take Diamox (aka acetazolamide), which "was developed in the early 1950s for the treatment of glaucoma and epilepsy" but later used for altitude sickness. "There is also," Synnott writes, "the simple fact that no one is in their right mind when they're climbing at these elevations. Oxygen deprivation puts every climber into a cognitive haze..."

My friend, S, has bookshelves stuffed with accounts by travellers, wildlife biologists, scientists, historians, soldiers and musicians. He's drawn to other worlds because ours sometimes can feel too narrow. Knowledge is joy and also perspective. We moan about space in Singapore and yet in the 1960s, in the Congo, by choice, Dian Fossey lived - as the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund website states - in a "7-by-10-foot tent (which) served as bedroom, bath, office and clothes-drying area".

Perhaps I am drawn to tribes because I am part of one. Writers don't just use language but have their own language. When Min Jin Lee, author of Pachinko, explains how she learnt to write, anyone who has struggled to string words together will nod. "There was so much to learn and practise," she wrote, "but I began to see the prose in verse and the verse in prose. Patterns surfaced in poems, stories, and plays. There was music in sentences and paragraphs. I could hear the silences in a sentence. All this schooling was like getting X-ray vision and animal-like hearing."

I've been lucky because as a journalist my job brings me into contact with various tribes. Once with two wildlife filmmakers who studied the habits of gharials for years. Another time with a man who willingly fell from a balloon from 38,969m. Why? Among other things, Felix Baumgartner feels somewhat trapped on land. As he simply said: "I feel free when I am in the air."

These types of people make us consider so much, sometimes even our own insignificance or the comfort zones we've slid into. They're people unlike us, who we should seek out via talks, or books, or podcasts, because they offer us another peek into life.

Last week a funeral was held in England for a gentleman who deeply loved the seas. When he was on his boat - his daughter told me - he'd religiously listen to the Shipping Forecast, which is a weather report issued four times a day by the Met Office and broadcast on BBC Radio. When his coffin was brought into church, in the most poignant of gestures, the Shipping Forecast of the day he died was played.

I'd never heard this Forecast before and so I went and found it on the BBC Radio 4 website and listened for a while. It was like another dialect and perhaps the next sailor I meet will explain its subtleties to me. This is the beauty of life, isn't it? Exploring the planet through strangers who become our interpreters.