Skydiving

What’s something you would attempt if you were guaranteed not to fail.

There are few guarantees in this life. They say Death and Taxes are the main ones, and you can finagle the latter depending on where you live. Cheating Death is a little more difficult.

Since I’m not an extreme risk-taker, skydiving has never been on my life’s to-do list. However, if—as the prompt suggests—I would be guaranteed not to fail (i.e., fall to the earth and my demise), I might try it.

A few years ago a good friend of mine decided to do that thing where you get strapped to an experienced person and then they take care of pulling the ripcord and guiding you safely down. After a few moments of free fall, my friend heard, “Uh, oh.” This is not an utterance you want interrupting the sound of wind rushing past your ears.

Fortunately, the backup cord worked, the chute deployed, and my friend landed safely, with an intense experience he lived through and with an added twist for the retelling of the story.

I’d be content with a simple jump, fall, deployment of chute, and glide to the earth. I’m sure the thrill would be amazing; a few years ago I boarded a car in Disneyland’s Space Mountain without first doing my research and realizing it was a roller coaster. I have always hated and feared roller coasters. For the first part of the ride my head was tucked down to my thighs and I thought I was going to die. And then something changed, and I realized I wasn’t on a Ride of Death—so I opened one eye, then the other, sat up, and then actually enjoyed the sensation of motion for the remaining seconds, and was sorry I hadn’t been more aware from the beginning so I could have enjoyed it from beginning to end.

I’m not sure where I’d get that guarantee for the parachute jump, though. Having studied Faust for much of my academic life, there will be no devil pacts for me. And so I’ll have to be satisfied with staying inside the plane whenever I am in flight.