We all question our ability at times. Uncertainty plagues us. It is even more intense if
ability we are questioning relates to something we have never tried or not succeeded at in past.Set backs are common, but we rarely welcome them. We are inclined to respond negatively to adversity. It may be time to revisit that reflexive response.
I had an experience recently that caused me to reconsider whether a negative response to adversity is always justified when I was confronted with a life-threatening situation.
It was mid-morning on a warm and pleasant Saturday. I was in midst of my first skydive of day. It was my 2,123th jump since having taken up sport fifteen years ago.
After about one minute of freefall and 5,000 above ground, I parted ways with my fellow jumpers to get far enough away from them to open my parachute safely. I initiated opening around 3,000 feet above earth.
My parachute opened with some twists in lines between parachute and me. This is not that uncommon. What was different this time was that I was not able to clear twists.
The twists in lines caused my parachute to take on an asymmetrical shape. Receiving asymmetrical inputs, canopy did what it is designed to do and initiated a turn -- that's how it's steered. The problem occurred when turn quickly became a rapid, diving downward spiral that was spinning me a full 360 degrees about once every second. This was a problem.
I looked up to assess my canopy and saw something I don't often see - horizon clearly visible ABOVE trailing edge of my canopy. This meant my canopy and I were now on roughly same horizontal plane. In that I could see horizon behind it, I was actually above my parachute and it was leading our fast spinning parade rapidly towards mother earth.
My first need was to acknowledge that I was not going to be able to solve this problem. This is not as easy as it seems. Having successfully completed over 2,100 jumps without having to resort to my second parachute, it was hard for me to believe I had really encountered a problem I could not solve. I had a natural inclination to assume I could fix this problem as I had all those in past.
Sound familiar? It's always easy to lapse into denial when confronted with a problem. Until we acknowledge problem and our possible inability to solve it - or to use methods we have used in past - we don't have a chance of making things better.
Fortunately, urgency of this situation caused my hard-headed nature to yield much quicker than usual. That decision probably took a second or two. The next step, having accepted need to follow a different course than in past, was to determine course. Fortunately fifteen years of training and practice before every day of jumping took hold.
I looked straight down at two handles on either side of my chest - one to release me from my malfunctioning canopy and one for deploying my reserve parachute - and realized I needed to quickly get them in my hands. I could not help but notice when I made eye contact with them, as had been ingrained in me during my First Jump Course way back in 1988, that by now rapid spins had turned me back to earth and there beyond my toes was once again horizon. This was bad!
