Near Life Experience

Aotearoa: Maori for "land of the long white cloud" or, as most Americans know it, New Zealand. As glorious of a country as this is through the window of a coach bus, we figure that while free falling from thousands of feet up, it's probably another thing all together. 

It is.

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An inactive volcano in NZ from our coach bus window.

A short drive from downtown Auckland, I arrive with a few friends at what appears to be a tiny renovated farmhouse. It doesn't look like the kind of skydiving operation I had envisioned, but sure enough, nestled inside is a quaint little office with some friendly Kiwis eager to get us up in the air. We sign a few papers and they hand us jumpsuits.


"Is everybody ready?!" Our instructor/tandem jumper, Kyle, claps his hands together as we walk outside where we'll wait for our turns to go up in pairs. But there's an odd number of us, so I volunteer to go up "alone" with the tandem jumper.



Are we READY? HA! Is that it? No more preparation? No more safety precautions to be aware of? What kind of place is this? I feel like this isn't how skydiving would be in America.....

No, I am NOT ready...I muse, aloud. What if my parachute doesn't open?? What if I get tangled up in it and strangled?? What if I land wrong and break every bone that matters?? Nobody briefed me on these things. I hear about stuff like this in the news....it happens all the time!

Kyle just laughs. I watch the first of my friends board the plane as I step into my jumpsuit and try not to think about how many people have probably pissed in it before I got here. 

I'm the last of our group to take the plunge. It's a very tiny plane, barely big enough for me, the pilot, and Kyle. How is this possibly safe? What am I doing? I mean, I did just watch all of my friends land safely, each with a mile-wide Cheshire grin....but I also recognize that statistically, this lowers the chances that I'll come out alive.

My heart is like dubstep as I take a "seat" in the back of the "plane"....or more accurately, replace "seat" with "3x3 space on the floor" and "plane" with "remote-controlled toy aircraft." Kyle starts buckling himself to my jumpsuit. He's making quirky conversation with me but I'm not really listening. I'm too busy hoping he's as good at multitasking as he claims to be at jumping out of planes. I really don't want him forgetting any buckles due to a little one man comedy routine.

The pilot starts the plane off down the runway and we quickly get off the ground. As we're ascending, they're both talking to me but it doesn't matter--I can barely hear them over the sound of the "plane" and even if I could, I wouldn't understand their thick Kiwi accents and lingo. Great. Now I won't even know I'm dying until I'm already dead because they're probably telling me "Open your parachute when ___________" or "whatever you do, do NOT __________!" or something equally imperative and I'm going to accidentally do the exact opposite of what they say and I'll end up in a pile of my own bones and I'll never graduate from college and I'll never get married and I'll never ha----------- LOOK OUT THE WINDOW! Kyle yells over the cacophony of the engine's hum and my thought hurricane. I turn my head to look.

Oh.

My.

God.



So this is what astonishment feels like. After all these years, I hadn't fully grasped it until now. I lift my goggles up off my face and blink several times to regain my composure. We're only 9,000 feet up but we can see both coasts simultaneously. We continue to fly in circles to soak up the view of radiant fields dotted with puffy white sheep more numerous than the country's human residents. I am overwhelmed by the brilliance of the green rolling hills that wrap themselves around the land. The vast vividity of this green is surreal...It's not even a real color. What I'm seeing here, this is Photoshop green. This beauty is even audible. Yes, the landscape below me is melodious -- A perfect angelic choir in symphony with God's giggle. Am I dead? Because this is exactly how Heaven appears to me in my dreams. I am suddenly conflicted by an immense desire to jump and a longing to stay up here where I can see this until my heart beats its last.

Me and Kyle

Luckily, I don't have to stay conflicted for long. Kyle has now fully attached himself to my back and begins scooting us towards the door. I hastily pull my goggles back down as he opens it. He does not ask me if I am ready. He flings us outside and immediately grabs on to a part of the plane that juts out from the side. I'm startled for a second until I realize that nothing is wrong- that he actually meant to do that. We float horizontally alongside the plane for a moment or two, billowing in the wind like some creepy human flag. And then he lets us go. Again, he does not ask me if I am ready. Good thing, too, because I'm probably not. What is "ready" anyway?

We fall.

It is everything I imagined it would be and it is everything I did not imagine it would be. Do you ever have a moment in which you tell yourself, "There has got to be more to life than this"? For me, this is a glimpse of the "more." A glimpse of the better things to come. This is not the near death experience I'm fearing it will be, but rather the near life experience I'm hoping for.

After about sixty seconds of what feels more like floating than free falling, Kyle opens our parachute.  He eventually hands me the reins and lets me direct our path back down towards Earth. My joy is effortless.

We land. And despite the illusion of Heaven, I'm not dead. In fact, I'm even more alive than before. As André Gide puts it,

"One does not discover new lands without consenting to lose sight of the shore for a very long time."

I wholeheartedly believe that the enrichment of a new perspective is always worth the fear of experience. And with each new perspective I am lucky enough to taste, I will have grown. Never to be the same. 

On the way home we all gush about our jumps. Some of us complain of sore groins from the harnesses. Some of us report having seen a double rainbow as we fell. Our friend, Eddie, contributes, "That was so scary! Skydiving makes Halloween seem like nothing!"

Oh, what I wouldn't give to relive that jump from Eddie's perspective!