Jumping, Falling, Shrinking
Jumping is an act of faith, and surviving the jump always brings me a sense of reconciliation. The act of jumping has been a small but important part of my life since as long as I can remember. The earliest thrill that I can recall from jumping came from rapelling down the cliffs above Billings, Montana. There, as a kid of six or seven, my dad took me climbing. For me, the thrill wasn't so much in the going up but in the coming down.
After going as high as the rope allows, a climber then leans back, now relying on the rope that he or she avoided the whole way up. There is such an incredible step of faith in that singular moment when you give your body over to the harness, carbiners and rope. It's the hardest thing for most people when they first begin to rappel- to trust in these strange devices and another person's hands to keep you from falling to your death.
Once I leaned back, I started jumping. Pushing off the wall with my legs as far as I could go, watching the rock that I struggled up now effortlessly floating away from me as I fell towards the ground. After swinging away from the wall, watching for where you can place your feet for the next push-- I was transfixed for those short moments of descent. At the bottom, the ground awaited, where I could stand again on my own, and the world came rushing back.
In high school, I pole vaulted. I could never jump high enough on my own to dunk a basketball, but with a flexible rod in my hands I could clear over a thirteen foot bar suspended in midair (13' 6" on a good day). It may look like a complicated technique (and it is) but when you do it in real time, it happens so quickly; sprint towards the bar, count your steps, lower the pole into the box, and leap. You feel the impact of the pole against the wall, and then you almost instantly find yourself up at the apex of the vault, willing your legs over the bar, pushing the pole away as your body falls back to earth. That singular moment returned when looking across the bar to make sure it remained in place as you begin the descent to the safety of the mats below.
In college my friends and I abandoned the gear and just started just jumping into water. Cliff jumping in central Virginia is excellent: from the handful of "Blue Holes" carved into streams, to the flooded quarries, to the high rocks around the Shenandoah, the opportunities were all around. The thrill of falling became something I could chase with my friends without the artificial gear of the climbing harness or the landing mats. We started conservative, just ten feet or so, before progressing up to forty, fifty, sixty feet... some went higher.
Eventually that wasn't enough, and I went higher. Jumping from a plane in flight gives me as long a fall as I can reasonably get on this planet. Skydiving is only different from cliff jumping in that you need gear again, in order to slow yourself down. Leaping still takes an intentional act, there is always a slowing of time to the here and now, and landing is part that can kill you.
It is not often articulated exactly what it is that pushes people to leap, or what makes it fun. It just seems intrinsically thrilling. But what is it exactly? I was told recently that cliff jumping is about facing fears. We are told from a young age to be careful around heights, for good reason. Falling is associated with injury or death. When elderly people fall, they break. Leaping from high bridges is how some people kill themselves. It makes sense to heed the danger. That danger is what creates the thrill.
But there's more to it, at least for me. There is that compression of time, that moment when you've left the safety of the ground and are now committed to a long fall, when the water below you freezes for a second and all the bullshit of your life becomes background noise. Physiologically, it makes sense, because your body believes it is in danger- everything else becomes of secondary importance.
There is also the faith in your jump. A common idiom for blind decisions made with a sort of desperate hope as a "leap" of faith. The idiom is appropriate in reverse as well-- leaping requires faith, the "faith of leaps." Where you are is usually safe and known- when your feet leave the ground you leave the safe and known behind, without much more than the hope that you will land in one piece.
A part of faith is necessarily trust. You have to trust the water below you to be deep enough, trust your friends who put you up to this that it won't end in tragedy, trust your parachute to open. But for me, there is a deeper question: can I trust that the world will still accept me when I land?
Every time you land, there is the risk of injury. Hell, everytime you walk there is the risk that you'll trip and fall, and that doesn't always end well. Crippled ankles, twisted knees, broken hips- these are all risks we bear every day. When you jump from a sixty foot rock into murky water or from a plane at fourteen thousand feet, the question of your safety becomes much more pressing and urgent. And you are forcing the issue- you intentionally put yourself in that place.
Once you've jumped a few dozen times, the adrenaline-choked fear seems to fade away, and it's replaced with a hunger of sorts. There is actually a sense of peace, found in that stillness where the rest of your world fades into the background in favor of the present moment. I believe the hunger that drives us to look for bigger leaps is a quest for validation, that the world still wants you around, as you are. When you land and find that you're still the shape that you started your downward journey in, there is a sense of relief, and a sense of reconciliation with the world.
Because when you leap you know that you've made mistakes. You know that you did not come to the height as a perfect person. When you leap into an abyss you put yourself in the crucible to be fired and tested. Your fall puts you in the hands of fate or luck, daring it to do what it will with you.
If you land safely, you look back up to where you jumped from as if it was on the other side of a universe and smile, knowing you have been given another chance. Maybe this quest for validation is rooted in a deeper insecurity that has to be solved internally. A million jumps may never solve that hunger-- parachutes can't bring a perfect penance. Maybe the need to keep jumping is just an addiction to adrenaline and endorphins. But that chemical explanation is metaphorically uninteresting, and doesn't address the calm that experienced jumpers have, who do not hunt for more dangerous thrills. Not every jumper is broken, not every jumper is an addict. Sometimes I jump to forget the world, but more often I leap to find my place in it again.
After going as high as the rope allows, a climber then leans back, now relying on the rope that he or she avoided the whole way up. There is such an incredible step of faith in that singular moment when you give your body over to the harness, carbiners and rope. It's the hardest thing for most people when they first begin to rappel- to trust in these strange devices and another person's hands to keep you from falling to your death.
Once I leaned back, I started jumping. Pushing off the wall with my legs as far as I could go, watching the rock that I struggled up now effortlessly floating away from me as I fell towards the ground. After swinging away from the wall, watching for where you can place your feet for the next push-- I was transfixed for those short moments of descent. At the bottom, the ground awaited, where I could stand again on my own, and the world came rushing back.
In high school, I pole vaulted. I could never jump high enough on my own to dunk a basketball, but with a flexible rod in my hands I could clear over a thirteen foot bar suspended in midair (13' 6" on a good day). It may look like a complicated technique (and it is) but when you do it in real time, it happens so quickly; sprint towards the bar, count your steps, lower the pole into the box, and leap. You feel the impact of the pole against the wall, and then you almost instantly find yourself up at the apex of the vault, willing your legs over the bar, pushing the pole away as your body falls back to earth. That singular moment returned when looking across the bar to make sure it remained in place as you begin the descent to the safety of the mats below.
In college my friends and I abandoned the gear and just started just jumping into water. Cliff jumping in central Virginia is excellent: from the handful of "Blue Holes" carved into streams, to the flooded quarries, to the high rocks around the Shenandoah, the opportunities were all around. The thrill of falling became something I could chase with my friends without the artificial gear of the climbing harness or the landing mats. We started conservative, just ten feet or so, before progressing up to forty, fifty, sixty feet... some went higher.
Eventually that wasn't enough, and I went higher. Jumping from a plane in flight gives me as long a fall as I can reasonably get on this planet. Skydiving is only different from cliff jumping in that you need gear again, in order to slow yourself down. Leaping still takes an intentional act, there is always a slowing of time to the here and now, and landing is part that can kill you.
It is not often articulated exactly what it is that pushes people to leap, or what makes it fun. It just seems intrinsically thrilling. But what is it exactly? I was told recently that cliff jumping is about facing fears. We are told from a young age to be careful around heights, for good reason. Falling is associated with injury or death. When elderly people fall, they break. Leaping from high bridges is how some people kill themselves. It makes sense to heed the danger. That danger is what creates the thrill.
But there's more to it, at least for me. There is that compression of time, that moment when you've left the safety of the ground and are now committed to a long fall, when the water below you freezes for a second and all the bullshit of your life becomes background noise. Physiologically, it makes sense, because your body believes it is in danger- everything else becomes of secondary importance.
There is also the faith in your jump. A common idiom for blind decisions made with a sort of desperate hope as a "leap" of faith. The idiom is appropriate in reverse as well-- leaping requires faith, the "faith of leaps." Where you are is usually safe and known- when your feet leave the ground you leave the safe and known behind, without much more than the hope that you will land in one piece.
A part of faith is necessarily trust. You have to trust the water below you to be deep enough, trust your friends who put you up to this that it won't end in tragedy, trust your parachute to open. But for me, there is a deeper question: can I trust that the world will still accept me when I land?
Every time you land, there is the risk of injury. Hell, everytime you walk there is the risk that you'll trip and fall, and that doesn't always end well. Crippled ankles, twisted knees, broken hips- these are all risks we bear every day. When you jump from a sixty foot rock into murky water or from a plane at fourteen thousand feet, the question of your safety becomes much more pressing and urgent. And you are forcing the issue- you intentionally put yourself in that place.
Once you've jumped a few dozen times, the adrenaline-choked fear seems to fade away, and it's replaced with a hunger of sorts. There is actually a sense of peace, found in that stillness where the rest of your world fades into the background in favor of the present moment. I believe the hunger that drives us to look for bigger leaps is a quest for validation, that the world still wants you around, as you are. When you land and find that you're still the shape that you started your downward journey in, there is a sense of relief, and a sense of reconciliation with the world.
Because when you leap you know that you've made mistakes. You know that you did not come to the height as a perfect person. When you leap into an abyss you put yourself in the crucible to be fired and tested. Your fall puts you in the hands of fate or luck, daring it to do what it will with you.
If you land safely, you look back up to where you jumped from as if it was on the other side of a universe and smile, knowing you have been given another chance. Maybe this quest for validation is rooted in a deeper insecurity that has to be solved internally. A million jumps may never solve that hunger-- parachutes can't bring a perfect penance. Maybe the need to keep jumping is just an addiction to adrenaline and endorphins. But that chemical explanation is metaphorically uninteresting, and doesn't address the calm that experienced jumpers have, who do not hunt for more dangerous thrills. Not every jumper is broken, not every jumper is an addict. Sometimes I jump to forget the world, but more often I leap to find my place in it again.
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