Free Fall!

I was nervous about jumping out of a plane at 15,000 feet. I had found bungy jumping quite scary. The hard thing wasn’t the jump itself but inching to the edge of the platform to make the jump. I was helped a bit by being interviewed at the time on TV by Paul Henry for AJ Hackett’s “This is Your Life”. I didn’t want to show too much fear to the viewers sitting at home on the couch!

There is some primitive part of your brain that screams to you: Don’t go any nearer to the edge, you could fall! The rational mind is telling you it’s okay: plenty of people have made the jump and it’s quite safe. But my mind was not comfortable inching out on the edge.

So how would it go at 15,000 feet. The night before I pictured myself hanging onto the aeroplane’s hatch like grim death unable to let go.

Strangely, it was a piece of cake. The primitive part of my mind clearly has no concept of 15,000 feet! The earth is just so far away that it can’t process it. We have climbed trees and mountains for hundreds of thousands of years. The danger of falling is coded probably in our DNA. Our evolutionary past doesn’t include jumping out of a plane at 15,000 feet.

So I just rolled out. There was no sensation even of falling. Nothing was rushing past for the senses to detect – other than the air. We fell at 200 km/h but didn’t feel that we were moving – just floating above the earth free as a bird. It was a fabulous feeling. We fell free for 60 seconds with Matt pulling the rip cord at 5,000 feet.

I loved it. It was exhilarating and exciting and there is nothing else like it.

I find myself in idle moments looking up at the blue sky and wispy clouds remembering the day I fell 10,000 feet through it. It’s something else.