After a crazy few weeks of travel from one country to another and coming back to show a friend the country of New Zealand in Five days total and then getting back to work this is about the first time I have had in a long time to reflect on the individual memories I have managed to make over these past few weeks… and boy there are too many to count, all of which I know I will remember for the rest of my life.
I thought I would start by describing one of my most favorite ones.. skydiving for the first time in my life. I know now that this will not be the only time however. That feeling, that rush of energy, excitement, anxiety is exactly the kind of feeling I crave all the time, but of course this was multiplied by about a million.
I should say that not only did I just skydive for the first time, I was actually experiencing this amazing flight over the beautiful Wollongong Beach of Sydney, Australia on an amazingly beautiful day. I don’t mean to brag but I don’t think it can get much better than that…
I found it funny how everything works at a place like Skydive the Beach however. Aussie tends to be a place catered to laid back people… well I guess if not catered to, it just has a lot of them. The workers at the skydive location were quite okay with taking their time picking us up from the train station, as well as getting us ready to go jump out of plane. Everything felt like a normal day to them although me, along with two of my close friends, were literally signing our lives away to these people in hope of getting some type of adrenaline rush out of it.
They handed over the release waivers that read,
“Please be aware and prepared to make arrangements for any such injuries such as: Death…”
The list goes on but at that point my mind wasn’t much concerned with the other items listed in possibilities of injury… I was literally given the option to purchase $30 life insurance that would cover any “issues” that occurred within the skydive up to $50,000. Ironically, I chose not to spend the $30 life protection and signed my life away in hopes that all would go well… yikes.
Anyway, they give you funny blue pants and harness you up ready to go just so you can wait and see the others that have gone up before you come swiftly flying into the ground. After about an hour you take a 20 minute bus to the airport. We walked through the hanger and briefly talked to the men that would soon be strapped to our backsides controlling our life’s fate with a simple pull of a string. Conversations included the regular, “So, where are you from? Why are you in Sydney? You like it?” The lovely small talk did not help the nerves…
We are then guided to our quite minuscule plane that is supposedly fit to hold all 18 of us. Oh but there’s a catch, we are all sitting in a sort of a massage-line fashion right up against each other, crotch to butt, as if that were supposed to force some comfort into us… it didn’t.
The plane begins to rise, it is rickety and loud as hell…. I can feel the cold air rush in from the OPEN door and I get goosebumps up my arms and down my spine. Oh, and by the way I am sitting right next to this door. Once we’ve lifted into the air they close the door. As we rise higher and higher, thousands of feet into the air, the skydiver currently strapped to me asks if i’ve ever felt a cloud before. Before I can even answer he opens the plane’s sliding (garage-like) door and sticks my hand straight into the center of a cloud! It’s absolutely freezing and it feels like mist or fog would feel coming at you at about 80 mph.
Soon we are 7,000 feet into the air and oh.. surprise surprise we are only halfway there! At this point the earth below us looks miles and miles away with the mountaintops fit in between my thumb and pointer finger, and yet still we rise.
We finally reach the top, a whooping 14,000 feet above ground and we are ready to jump. I was number three in a line of 8, and before my two friends. I was grateful for this because the wait was so long up until this point if I had had to wait any longer I think the blood would have drained from my brain and I would have fainted strapped right onto my skydiver..
Anyway, the first guy goes, and let me tell you… when they say you “jump out of a plane” when you skydive…. they lie. You get sucked out of a plane when you skydive. Absolutely sucked right out the back with a small flip and then you’re flying!
A free fall of 60 whole seconds. Literally one full minute of falling through the air without an attachment to anything but gravity itself. That one minute felt like a beautiful lifetime passing before me. I really forgot about the parachute. I felt the wind cold on my stomach, blowing into my face and I couldn’t help but smile. I could taste the oxygen rushing into my mouth, literally taste it as if it were a flavor. I found that part fascinating. There’s nothing like that feeling really, the feeling of flying. I wonder if the birds feel a bit of that too… maybe that’s a silly thought, but if I could I think I would be a bird in another life just so I could feel that feeling everyday.
The parachute comes out of no where and your whole body gets catapulted underneath you so that you are then standing up right again… but oh, not standing I suppose, because you’re still flying! At that moment all sound cut from my ears, completely gone from the pressure, and it felt like my shirt had flown off in the free fall, I actually had to look down and check.. but it was just the disguise of the cold wind that had blown through it thank god.
My skydiver took my hands and let me “drive” the parachute, we went and stood on clouds, did corkscrews in the sky, and gazed down at the beautiful ocean below us as if we would never come back to earth. In that moment, I wanted to stay up there forever.
After a few minutes of playing in the sky we then came closer and closer to the land and needed to make a move for the landing zone. My guy took the parachute and glided it over to a large grassy area next to the beach. He swooped me into the land safely and all was well after this crazy journey of getting sucked out of a plane.
I honestly believe that every person should experience a feeling like this at some point in their life. Even those that are scared, because the feeling is worth any ounce of fear that one may have. I really do believe that.
I’m hoping this written illustration has the power to convince at least one person in the world to do it for themselves. 🙂
Joyful Thinking 