Jump! Leap! Now.
by Melissa O’Brien Eyre
July 15, 2010, pg 17

I decided, when I turned 45 back in May, that I would welcome the new year by jumping out of a plane. My entire life I was the person who, when faced with the idea of skydiving, shook my head, said no thanks and walked the other way. Something, God knows what this time around, made me walk right up to the idea. And not only did I want to jump from solid airplane floor into thin air, I wanted to do it alone—no friends, no family, no cameras.

Pretty much everything we do these days is translated into a Facebook moment. We know when our friends are camping with their kids, at a concert, tired, bored, planning a trip to Albuquerque. It’s both fascinating and grotesque. I think that most of us can agree that somewhere along the line things went terribly awry when we began to think that the world actually cares what we’re having for dinner.

When I walked into the check-in building at the skydiving place in Addison, I barely had time to finish apologizing for being late before the woman at the counter started trying to sell me the video package. Never mind that this would essentially double the cost of an already-expensive ten-minute activity, but I had decided that this particular moment was not going to be fodder for anyone’s awe but my own. I had no intention of falling back to earth with a camera in my schnoz.

After waiting for almost an hour, during which I managed to imagine pretty much everything that could go wrong, with accompanying soundtrack, I was stuffed into a tiny plane with three big guys. My instructor, who seemed to be channeling John Wayne (and with hundreds, maybe thousands of jumps under his belt) was completely nonplussed and spent most of our time together gnawing on a toothpick. He told me what I needed to know and he made sure all the equipment was working properly. I loved it. I wasn’t in a chatting mood. I wanted to feel what was happening, in a space uncluttered by words.

Once we reached altitude there wasn’t time to panic. The door opened, I sat on the edge, and didn’t so much jump as was pushed. Strapped tightly to John Wayne, I surprised myself by getting immediately into the right position and I surprised myself even more by loving every single second of the fall. One moment I was laughing, the next crying. I could barely believe that it was possible to see and feel the world in a new way. At 45.

In early June a man I knew when I lived in southern Vermont—a beautiful man, full of life, madly in love with his family, friends with anyone who ever had the good fortune to cross his path, owner of a successful excavation business, was driving his pick-up to a logging site when a rogue gust of wind caused a tree limb to hit the top of his truck, killing him instantly. Matt Waite lived a life most of us plan for and dream of, and it was over in a moment at 51.

Everyone has one of these stories—of a friend or family member whose number came up well before we were prepared. What does this have to do with jumping out of a plane? Well, nothing, really, except that life seems to keep teaching us the same lesson over and over…Jump! Leap! Now. Do it just because you want to. Life’s not a photo op and we’re not living in eternity. You want to see the Rockies? Then, by golly, get in your car and go see the Rockies. They may not be going anywhere, but you sure as heck are. Take risks. Lots of them. Matt flew planes and raced cars, and in the end it was a tree limb that took him from us. Be prepared to fall hard and fast and love the coming down as much as the going up. Because my God, if life isn’t for living, I don’t know what is.