This is part three of a three part post.

If you’re just showing up now, go here first.

And if you’ve been with me all along, this is the third installment about how we begin with ‘no’.

Jumping from airplanes has a very low survival rate. With a parachute, that rate increases, yet is by no means perfect.

Problems can occur. When not corrected in a timely fashion, these little problems can have big impacts.

Here’s the routine - leave the plane, arch the body in a ‘flying position’ then look up to see if the parachute was open. That would be a problem. Even worse would be a partially opened chute with a bunch of tangled ropes. This situation would likely cause a skydiver to spin out of control while plummeting to their almost certain doom.

Our hippie instructor wasn’t going to let us go without a fight.

The skydiving rigs we used had two parachutes. Well, three really. The first is a small one that’s there to pull out the main canopy. That’s the pilot chute. Ideally that’s what you ‘fly’ with. It’s like a kite. You can steer it by pulling ropes to close ends of the cute creating drag.

If the pilot chute didn’t pull open the main canopy, the reserve / emergency chute would need to be deployed. Before that, the main canopy needed to be released or ‘cut away’ as Roger described the process.

In the event of an emergency, we needed to be able to act quickly

It takes around twelve seconds for a human falling from a plane to reach terminal velocity which is around a hundred and ninety kilometers per hour.

By the time we made it to ‘check’ thousand, if the chute wasn’t opened, we would have been half way to terminal velocity and a third of the way to the ground.

I dunno about you, but I’m not great with making decisions under pressure. Not that kind of pressure anyway. With that in mind, we did a lot of practicing some thing very very simple.

Look. Identify. Grab. Punch right. Punch left

If things were going badly, we’d look at our chest. Then we trained to grab the two toggles there. Punch right to cut away the main chute. Punch left to deploy the reserve chute.

We practiced this so much that I was worried. What if my chute was fine and I freaked out and cut away a perfectly good parachute and deployed my reserve chute because I automatically did the drills that I was practicing.

Roger assured me that my chute would open and I’d likely be so disoriented that in the unlikely event of an emergency, I’d likely just blank on the training and he’d be sure to send a new, clean shop vac on to the airfield to ensure my mother received all of me.

With emergency procedures out of the way we practiced loading and unloading the perfectly good aircraft.1 This was when things felt real. My stomach began to protest. And I went through the motions with my friends.

It was funny experience filled with sideways glances and nervous laughter. Were we really doing this? We were all terrified. We all said as much. And. We all paid to be there. We were all going to do it.

It was time. Time to get into the reasonably serviceable aircraft.

This is where my stomach really began to protest. It held up banners and signs. It even attempted to begin a chant of “No Freefall, no peace” and ‘Heck no I won’t go’. They even attempted to make jokes. All they could muster were weak, whispered greasy farts of panic emanating somewhere near the depths of my soul.

Everything got strange. I felt incredibly shaky but was still. Things became mechanical. We put on our gear. We loaded into the plane. One by one we got out of the plane and flew solo to the waiting ground.

Seems simple right?

It was.

Even though my entire body was screaming NO, I went along with the process. Putting on the parachute and helmet all I could think is “What the hell am I doing?” Every ounce of me said ‘no’. And I kept going.

We walked up to the plane. Every nerve in my body said ‘no’, yet I kept moving my feet, climbing into my position. Waiting. Wondering. Worrying.

The plane took off.

Oh my.

That was a moment. I have done a lot of traveling by airplane. Big. Jet. Commercial. Airplane.

Those suckers feel and behave differently than an old single engine shitbox. The Cessna felt loose and floppy. It felt like it could fall out of the sky at any moment. It felt like it would be ripped apart my the force of the wind.

At a molecular level I ‘felt’ as though the ‘airplane’ was ready to retire. It was time for that plane to start a new life - perhaps as a bike frame or series of beer cans. But airplane? Sure, it few. I watched it take off and land. I’m not expert on aircraft safety and this plane did little to quiet my raging guts who were, at this point, ready to make an abrupt and hasty exit into my Stanfields underpants.

In the airplane I was still saying no.

No as we watched the runway speeding beneath us.

No as the airplane banked such that we all had to hold on for dear life lest we fall out of the open door.2

No as I watched Dick take his place in the opening.

No as I watched Dick disappear.

No when it was my turn to move forward.

No as my hand reached for the wing.

There was no way I was going skydiving.

And at the last moment, just as I was about to climb back into the plane and strap myself to the seat of shame, I changed my mind. I said yes.

And with that yes,

I slowly

let go.

Slipped away

And left the plane.

It was glorious, much like being on a massive swing that’s held by the heavens. Flying the parachute to the ground lasted a few minutes.

It was a whole lot of build up for a very little action.

With every ‘no’ I told myself, I became a little more tense.

When I finally said ‘yes’ and acted, everything became more relaxed. I released in almost every way I could, without soiling my underpants.

Every no that I said, I didn’t say consciously. Each no was a bit of tension in my body, revulsion at the irrational, absurd actions I was taking.

But my will won. I wanted to skydive. My body said no but I eventually did it. I did it, because it seemed inevitable. After all of the time and all of the training and all of the procedures and all of the expectations it would have been more difficult emotionally to walk away than to go through with things.

When I left the plane, I didn’t think about any of the training. I didn’t arch. I didn’t check. My feet moved like Fred Flinstone in his car. My chute opened and I flew myself to the ground guided by Roger’s crackly voice on the radio. If there was an emergency, I might have been able to do something about, but not likely.

Each of us sunk a lot of time and money into the weekend. We spent two day preparing to go against every instinct and jump out of an airplane. The time we took to train seemed to be the time we needed to let our bodies say no repeatedly until our minds could answer yes once.

The training was the support we needed to make the jumping part both possible and inevitable.

Fast forward to last week at the barn. Megan asked: Do you want to take Eddie for a cantor? Every fiber of my existence screamed no. Only now, I’m really used to saying ‘no’ first. I give that part of me a bit of time.

It seems the more I listen to it, the less it screams, the less I need to listen to it before making a decision to go.

After months of riding I was ready. It seemed too soon. It took years before my children started to canter. More doubt. More no’s.

It was time.

I shortened my reigns and brought my leg behind Eddie’s girth. I clicked my tongue and clucked the word ‘Git’.

Eddie listened. We launched forward.

I wasn’t cantering. I was with Eddie.

I Eddie. I no horse. I bird.

I finally discovered what Eddie meant.

There we were. A hundred and sixty pound man, on a sixteen hundred pound warm blooded hairy, four legged, wingless bird, flying around a dusty riding ring.

After a whole lotta ‘no’, we only had to say yes once.

How much do you have to say no before things turn to ‘yes’?

How do the structures around you both allow for an initial ‘no’ and eventual mind change?

How can you support yourself to jump out of life’s ‘perfectly good airplanes’?