Desire, Risk & Carving through the Sky

Skydiving is a mystical sport, sometimes seeming a little out of reach for most. Too crazy or too expensive. I couldn't do that. Maybe it’s one for the bucket list. When I talk to people about doing the sport, they either give these comments or they become childlike and ecstatic but when it comes to turning that excitement into their first jump, it’s usually cold feet.

Why reject yourself from one of most special experiences you could have in this life? It’s a chance to be a little more than human, captured in a 60 second fall towards the earth.

The answer is fear.

Since hitting some sort of relative awareness through my teens, I've always had an interesting relationship with fear. This was likely the main motivator when I signed up to to do a static line course (the original method to learn how to skydive, still performed by the army in the UK) with no previous experience or knowledge of the sport. It was a daydream turning itself into reality. I had so much desire to try something that I didn't feel fear.

Until the day. Surprisingly to me, when I showed up to the 'DZ' (the hangar where the plane takes off and where you usually land after the jump), skydiving simultaneously became both the worst and best thing I decided to do. In the face of uncertainty, the unbreakable excitement I had for the weeks before was replaced by an irreplaceable dread of actually doing what I said I was going to do. Worse, I convinced my hesitant best friend to join me in both learning, and jumping. So throughout the day I had to pretend my uncomprimising optimism hadn’t faltered.

It would be reminiscent to recall the day and its details, however, it essentially was a course that told us everything that could go wrong, how to fix it and also how to (in theory) deal with all the tasks of the jump, most of which were chronically under explained, since you had zero experience doing anything they told you.

Then the actual jump. Quietly hoping that it would be called off because of sunset or bad weather, it wasn’t. So we got ready. This is the point where you begin feeling like an underprepared astronaut, culminating in a walk out to a small Cessna plane in your lame jumpsuit and massive parachute. It's an alien experience from here on out. On the journey up a beautiful sunset was somewhat calming until the jump-master (leading instructor in this case) opened the door . Then you realise you have never been in a airbourne plane with the door open.

It's very noisy, and windy at this point. Being the tallest, and heaviest, of our group of optimistic imbociles, I was the last student to jump. There’s something quite strange about seeing the dread on the little pale face of your best friend, before he jumps straight into the ether. Not much time to think about it though as the instructor points to you to get ready. I remember quite clearly the mutter of ‘I can’t do it’ to Simon, the instructor, as I crawled across the Cessna. Hoping he would save me from the situation I found myself in. His response? ‘You can’, followed by a laugh. I supposed that was enough.

So here I was, prime position. My head in the plane, and my legs hanging out of it. There's nothing quite like knowing there is 10,000ft of air beneath your feet, with nothing inbetween or stopping you from falling except the friction of your ass on the floor of the plane.

This is where your monkey mind starts to take over. Once you are alone at the door, the first thing to leave you is the theory that you thought you knew. Despite conceptualising the feat for months (on conceptualising what you can, through Youtube videos), doing the course on the day and saying you were ready. You wern't. Sure, theory provided a map, and prepared you somewhere in your brain. However, in reality it was all instinct. Looking right where the instructor pointed me to look, I think something akin to 'fuck it'. One, Two, Push.

That’s it. You can't go back. The virgin feeling of freefall is like, what I imagine, returning to the womb or being caught in a tornado would feel like. The moment in an awk dream in which you wake up from falling, except you don’t jolt yourself awake. After a few moments of sensory overload, before your brain can make sense of the situation, the parachute does its job, and one regains control - slowly figuring out how to fly a canopy then deciding upon a path towards landing. Another new and scary experience.

After managing to avoid the sheep with my feet gently touching the ground, the adrenaline continued to flow. I was hooked. So was my friend Patrick - at least for the 15 minutes he wanted to jump again (until the adrenaline ran out and he didn’t). So, as an impatient individual, I decided to do what a young university student should be doing - saving all of his money to blow on an even more expensive, accelerated skydiving course in a sunny skies of the Algarve, Portugal. This is where I really started to learn.

After putting down all my hard earned cash working in the Apple Store alongside my 80-hour study weeks for my architecture degree, I skipped my graduation with a bout of nonchalant, and flew to the Algarve. I realised soon after that the risk was not only in the task itself (which inherently is actually quite low risk due to, among other things, strict regulation) but in the possibility of a failing tests - the worst possible outcome in the mind of a conditioned twenty year old who spent the last three years of his life doing everything he could to over-achieve.

To explain simply, to become a skydiver you must get your license. To get your license, you are placed in a series of 8 tests or 'levels', that get progressively more difficult and test your ability to be stable in the air. I progressed swiftly though the first few but momentum soon ground to a halt and with the thought of failure, came failure. I jumped, but I was unable to fly. I kept pushing, repeating. To no avail. I ran out of time, money and perhaps most importantly, enthusiasm. I actually learned here that I didn't know how to fail or how to recover from set-backs.

After being sad for a while, I became infatuated. Not even with the idea of being a skydiver, but of overcoming a failure. It might have been the scariest thing I’ve ever done but jumping out of a plane wasn’t nearly as scary as giving up or failing, twice.

This infactuation, however, had to be balanced with my other desire to become a great architect. This brought me to Barcelona, to China to practice my profession. Once I accrued enough experience (and cash) it brought me through India, then LA.

This required frugality. And creativity. To make money I taught economics to Chinese teenagers, and a presenter of infomercials on Chinese Amazon. I hope no one I know ever sees the videos. Once I arrived in LAX, I once slept in a bus station in the middle of Bakersfield in California, and when I tried to do it another night, got kicked out.

This taught me the nature of desire and risk. It was exhilerating.

The daydreams. The realisation of those daydreams. The love of the sport. The lucid nature of staying up late. The backpacking. The people met along the way.

I wanted it more than anything. I couldn't give up. I couldn't stop thinking about it. It couldn't help itself but come up in conversation with others. Talking about it with everyone. Writing it down. Then, when the moment came, making it happen (perhaps with a lot of suffering, perhaps not). This suffering is nothing in the later feeling of mastery, or at least achievement.

In hindsight, I could have waited until I was a little older with a little more cash. Yet there’s nothing like an adventure that is above your means, your experience, and your ability. One where you have to sacrifice, risk (both finance and mental alienation from failure) and become better, in order to succeed. I’m confident that without a obsessive-compulsion to achieve that which I dreamed, that I would not have had the journey I did. This pursuit is what gave me meaning in life, and the desire to push myself.

I still believe that for any long term pursuit of meaningful reward, I believe it is better to get the rewards from risk earlier in life. As the earlier you earn these rewards, the longer you get to enjoy them, and the change they instill in you has more time to compound into something greater than the reward itself. To this day I still reap the rewards of overcoming fear. Everything that is slighly scary can be made less so through the perspective of what it takes to jump from a plane for the first time.

I also learned that you can do anything if you are prepared to deal with the trade-offs. From China, to India to backpacking across Southern California and the connection with those along the way (an extreme oversimplification of one of the most transformative and exceptional years of my life). To win big, you must be prepared to fail hard. If it’s within your means - you are doing it wrong. Yet winning often means you will lose elsewhere. That's okay if you are aware.

Perhaps the only thing I would change, though, is that I went the full way with a friend by my side. There wasn’t many feelings like the drive home with my friend Patrick after our first jump. Perhaps it really is true that happiness is only real when shared.