Jumping for fun
I started jumping BASE jumping in the spring of 2000. My jumping history has been full of ups and downs, like many I think. Being a fairly philosophical person, I tend to look at these ups and downs and try to extract some kind of "meaning" from them--something that will help me grow as a human being. This isn't always possible, but sometimes I stumble across a lesson in BASE which gets its fingers pretty well into my whole life. This is a story about one of those lessons. To some extent, I think we all make a calculation of risk versus reward for any jump we do (or walk away from). The measure of these two factors seems to be a very individual thing, and even for one person it can change over time. When I started jumping, I think the bulk of the reward came from overcoming fear. I still remember how deep I had to dig to get my feet off that first span. It's hard to say exactly where that fear came from, and it's probably best just to leave it at a "deep fear" with which many of you are probably familiar.
I remember this fear continuing for a very long time. I suppose that when I started skydiving, I felt a similar fear. But in skydiving, it didn't take long before that fear melted into the excitement of learning new skills. Probably within my first 30 skydives, stepping off the plane was no longer an issue. But even after 100 BASE jumps, the exit point was still a scary place for me.
In the summer of 2002, with 135 jumps, I took a six-month sabbatical from BASE jumping. I had started to look at everything in terms of whether or not it was jumpable. I felt somehow guilty if I wasn't out jumping when the winds were calm. I decided to take a break, until I could look at a cliff and see something other than landing possibilities, appropriate delays, etc. I returned to jumping one weekend in the following winter, when I felt inspired to join some friends on a trip to the local static-line span.
Sometime around 150 jumps, three years after I started, I began to feel a bit ambivalent about jumping. This ambivalence has continued more or less to the present day. I've gone on trips where I could have done maybe 10 or 15 jumps, but I did 2 or 3 instead. My heart just wasn't in it, but this fact was masked by my reasoning that 1) I'm not really a big numbers person and 2) I wanted to enjoy each jump, not just pound off a whole lot of them.
About six months ago, I made a trip to a local free-stander with a couple of friends. I've done this jump many times, and nothing felt different about this time. In fact, it felt decidedly boring. Why?
Something occured to me very recently. Suppose I had become accustomed to measuring the reward of a jump in terms of the fear overcome. I think this is the sort of thing we might do habitually, long after it has outlived its usefulness. Over time, it seems natural that fear will subside. We can always take our jumping to a new level, but even that level will eventually appear less risky. There are two scenarios I see unfolding from this. In one, I could continually search for new fears to be overcome. After a while I think this path becomes dangerous, particularly if I am raising the bar on every jump. In the second scenario, I would continue to do jumps in which I am not overcoming any particular fear, but these jumps would seem less and less fulfilling, until eventually the risk outweighed the reward.
I think this is exactly the path I've been walking. I've done fewer and fewer jumps because of a general feeling of apathy, while the jumps that I have done seem often to have involved a heightened component of risk (which, I suppose, brings with it enough fear to balance things out).
A solution has also occured to me. "Solution" seems like the wrong word, actually, since I don't quite believe that these kinds of things have a solution. Perhaps I should call it an "experiment" whose outcome is not yet known. It seems to me that often we might become so accustomed to pursuing a particular goal (say, overcoming fear) that when we finally achieve the goal, we forget what has habitually been driving us. Without a new direction, we wind up bound by our pursuit of the original goal.
What's got me excited about jumping again is the idea of jumping "for fun". While this may sound obvious to some, it really isn't obvious to me. I've been jumping so long to overcome fear, that relinquishing fear is not at all a trivial thing. I think it's necessary, here, to separate the ideas of "fear" and "caution". Certainly I think it's possible to let go of fear while retaining a healthy sense of what can go wrong. Somehow, it seems to me there is more to fear than just the awareness of risk.
I had my first opportunity today to test this theory. To be honest, I wasn't sure it would hold up in the real world. It's one thing to sit at home and philosophize, "What I'm going to do, is I'm going to let go of my fear and just have fun." It's a whole other thing to feel it at the exit point. But I did feel it. I'm not saying I've ascended to a new level or anything. It never really works like that. But standing at the exit point, I told myself, "I'm doing this for fun," and it actually rang true.
Michael
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