176 Feet Per Second

I went skydiving this weekend! Ergo, this post should be about an adrenaline rush.
But it's not.

Instead, it's about a little airport in a field near Interstate-55. Next to a pothole-scarred dirt road, there's a hangar with its floor covered in carpet scraps. Inside that hangar the feeling in the place is almost like a commune: bright colors, an occasional cigarette, worn-in furniture, people who aren't family but seem to know everything about each other. It's a group with inside jokes to tell and an endless supply of high-fives to give out. It's a group that makes newcomers feel comfortable and strangers feel a little less strange.

 

What's striking, though, is that they're a group of people who have mastered the art of being relentlessly meticulous while managing to seem completely carefree. Somehow in the background of all that fun (or actually in the foreground, so blatantly right-in-front-of-you that you miss it if you're not paying attention), they are laying out every line, inspecting every inch of rigging, and folding every bit of fabric perfectly. They are thinking about how my life and their lives depend on it. That's a heavy job. And they're making it look easy.


 

In my day-to-day work at the hospital, it's so easy to get swallowed into the noise of other people's pain and fear compounded by my own doubt. Sometimes, I feel absent. The joy and wonder get lost because of the intensity of what's at stake.

 

But here in the hangar, with its beat-up old couch and its barbecue grill in the corner and its rack of jumpsuits in every cornea-searing shade of neon known to man, the joy and wonder are practically palpable because of the intensity of what's at stake.

It's hard to explain, but somehow all of that accounts for why, when I stepped out of an airplane two miles above the earth and hurtled into free-fall (with a tandem instructor strapped to my back doing all the actual work), I didn't feel any fear. Instead of a rush of nervous adrenaline, it felt like a tingling wave of total calm. I felt alive, but not in the wild uncontrollable way that acts as the flipside of the coin stamped "facing death."

I felt present.