Age Increases, Confidence Decreases?

I went for my diving refresher course this morning, in preparation for my Cebu trip. It has been five years since my last dive, which by the way was my one and only diving trip...

I have also considered myself to be pretty confident in the water and have always being involved in water sports, swimming, canoeing, dragonboating till I graduated and sports sadly became a holiday activity. I was the water-babe. Anyway, back to this morning, I was in the swimming pool going through all the necessary drills and procedures needed to save my life in diving emergencies, I realised that I cannot smoothly execute some of the basic drills needed. All the stuff I had difficulty in doing now, were stuff which I had no problem doing five years ago...Beside the fact that I was ten times fitter five years ago, the main issue here is confidence.
Task One: Flooding my mask and clearing the water out....took me ten minutes to find the courage to let water into my mask and of course another ten minutes to let the water out, which by the time, I had already breathed in noseful of water and nearly caused myself to choke..glurp...
Task Two: Oral Inflation of my BCD (the vest thing which divers wear, somewhat like a life jacket). Almost drowned the first time I tried (cannot understand why) It is a simple matter of keeping my head above the water while I blow air into the BCD to inflate it. Couldn't do it because I just kept thinking that the tank is too heavy so almost drowned myself in the swimming pool.

As we get older, we start to get "wiser". We consider, we ponder, we think and we think too much. When we do that we get afraid. Afraid of the unknown, maybe bad things will happen if we do this or that. Maybe...I wonder where the fearlessness of my youth went. I went on a round-Ubin cycling trip 2 days after I learnt how to ride a bike, bearing in mind that Pulau Ubin twelve years ago has only 1 paved road, so the trip was all-out all-terrain cycling . At 18, a group of 5 or 6 of us led a group of twenty 17-year olds fairly new climbers up the slipperly and steep slopes of Kota Tinggi and stayed overnight on the lightning-proned summit. We also decided that 2 girls and a boy climbing Kota Tinggi and spending a night at the summit with no weapon more impressive than a sharp ended comb was a great idea (Tin must be laughing when she is reading this because she knows exactly what I am talking about, haha)

What was I thinking about then? Or maybe I should ask myself, what am I thinking of NOW? Why am I thinking so much, why am I afraid?