The "letter" or explain to your family
I am just curious about whether new jumpers are making "the letter" or any explaination to your families at what you are doing when you enter BASE. I went through alot of problems when starting my journey into BASE that I almost stopped it, it made me think alot about what I was doing, and I lost alot in deciding to continue. So with the (supposed) easy journey most people make nowadays in getting into BASE I just wonder if people think about what it means really......................... Taken from a post I made on BLiNC: http://www.blincmagazine.com/...owthread.php?t=22302
In reply to:
Not sure if it’s the same thing, but when I first got into BASE I wrote a letter to my family and friends should I get killed on a BASE jump. I have sent this to several friends who are keeping a hard copy and will release it should I go in. In this letter I explain my reasons for BASE jumping, I explain to them not to focus any blame on the community or the people with me, I point them to places where they may find more technical explanations of the incident, I explain what I want at my funeral, and have a few personal messages and explanations that hopefully will make my death easier to handle (although this is something hard to actually do I guess). I have been told this is a morbid thing to do, but for my family and friends I feel I need to do this - I don’t want to have any of my family showing any negativity towards any of my friends or towards the sport that I love and do. The reason I wrote this letter is due to the family / friends fall out I had at the start of my BASE journey, my mother refused to speak to me about it and was upset, my aunt refused to talk to me for about a year because of it and even a few skydiver friends showed negativity toward me because of it. I broke up with my long term GF because of it, my employers took me into meetings and questioned my new found activity and generally I had a rough time, so much so I even questioned whether it was all worth it.
One of the things I found necessary, was to sit down with people close to you and explaining your new found love. I sat down with my Aunt and showed her some video of some jumps from a nice day time large A with a “X” in Belgium and explained to her the way we make jumps, she then changed her opinion as she saw that we were not the “yeeeehaaa Pepsi max Xtreme risk takers” she had thought of in the sport, I sat with my mother and spoke at lengths at what I get from the sport and from the videos I showed she also saw that we were sensible and this changed her opinion of the sport and realised that this is now something I need to do. I did this with most members of my close family, and think that doing this has ensured they will not be negative toward my friends and sport should the Black Death aspect come and bite me. So much so infact, that even getting injured and having problems in getting through recovery my close family have not once questioned me in whether I am going back to jumping, or when I speak to them about the jumps I want to do on my return back to the sport they not once question why………….. Without the explanations at the start I would have had a harder time of it I am sure.
I am curious as to whether the “letter” and explanations are something other people have done when entering BASE? – I think that if this is what Tom is talking about on his course then I think it very necessary, but that’s just because it works for me.
