Jumping from a plane

Sophia Li, a junior at St. John’s School, went skydiving in Australia.

The summer of 2014, I was in Cairns, Australia. The ocean’s harbor contoured like a distorted parabola, cluttered with rows of bayside restaurants. As the sun broke over the water, signaling dawn, fishermen unloaded sea bass and crustaceans into red plastic buckets filled with ice. Their boats bobbed, anchored to the ocean floor. The sea breeze was salty to the tongue.

It was here that I found an advertisement for skydiving. Come conquer the skies with us! it read. If an 80-year-old grandmother can do it, so can you!

I was never one to turn down a challenge. So the next morning, I biked to the agency, paid the obscene fee, and after a blur of flurried movement and safety videos, all of a sudden I was up in the air inside a cramped aircraft with my tandem master waving a small video camera in front of me.

For some strange reason, fear didn’t come to me. Sure, I had the tingling sensations of adrenaline rushing through my body, but my mind was mostly numb as the plane reached 10,000 feet. I guess I had accepted the fact that I would exit at 10,000 feet and that I would survive.

When I jumped, time seemed to slow down. I stared straight down at the grassy fields, my arms stretched out like I was flying in a tunnel of gravity, awaiting a hug from my very own planet. I landed safely (actually I tripped over my parachute, but that was after landing, so it doesn’t count).

Skydiving is one of the best decisions I’ve ever made. Too often I feel like I’m trapped in the rigid expectations of this world, like I walk around each day with tunnel vision, blind to everything in my periphery. To be able to look at our world from an aerial view, from a place where nothing, not even gravity can pull you down quickly enough, gave me a new perception of who I was as a person, of what I desired to accomplish during my lifetime. To fly free is an experience I would never give up.

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