I have a bucket list, do you?  I’m chuffed to have crossed off a lot of things off my list, but as I’ve gotten older, its become ever more apparent that if I didn’t get my act together I wouldn’t achieve all my aims. So I bit the bullet recently and signed up for a charity, tandem skydive.

For the uninitiated there’s a difference between a parachute jump and a skydive.  A parachute jump is as it suggests, you jump from a plane, the parachute opens and you float back to earth – hopefully without a bump.  A tandem skydive is a bit different – yes, you still jump from a plane but then you free fall before the parachute opens.  In my case the free fall was about 40 seconds 10,500 feet (circa 2 miles) at about 170 miles an hour, before the parachute opened.

I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t nervous beforehand, actually that’s a huge understatement.  My younger self would’ve laughed while skipping towards the plane and whooping as she jumped out, but it’s amazing how much more aware of your own mortality you are as you get older.  I’ll admit it, I cried in the plane on the way up and screamed most of the way down, well at least until the parachute opened.  I’d spent so much time psyching myself up that I’d imagined everything that could go wrong!

Once my parachute opened and I hung in the air looking out across the beautiful Suffolk countryside with just the breeze as my backing track, I gained perspective (in more than one way) I was bursting with pride in myself for going through with it, thrilled at all the money I’d managed to raise for a really brilliant charity (Break), exhilarated, buzzing and relieved.

And that’s the lesson I took from my leap of faith; stop dwelling on the risk and focus on the reward.  My reward was an experience I will never forget and the pride written all over my teenage sons face when I landed (that and the big hugs and cuddles he gave me when he told me how amazing he thought I was!), money just can’t buy that.

You might ask, what’s next?  Well, I want to do a zipline across a canyon or quarry – they say it’s the closest we can get to flying, and who wouldn’t want to fly?!

Posted by Lisa