Jumping off a Bridge

Does a real man have to jump off a bridge? I'd say not... However I would recommend it...

I'm not sure if I mentioned (that is a lie), but I have changed a lot in the past few years... Once upon a time, if I found something scary, or just didn't want to face up to it, I would avoid doing it. It wouldn't matter what anyone said, or who tried to persuade me, I would just flat refuse to do it... I've always been pretty much immune to peer pressure in this regard.

I think part of the reason was a particularly traumatic experience in my childhood (I may tell you more about it in a future post...), which I learned to cope with by withdrawing from the threat and hiding. This became something of a pattern through my teenage years. If I was scared or challenged by something my default reaction was to shrink from the challenge and pretend I didn't want to do it in the first place...

A couple of examples spring to mind. Both of which happened at school... One of these was on an annual sponsorship day... The school would organise these to raise money for various charities. All of the pupils would take place in various events and get sponsored by everyone that they could drag money out of. In this particular year I decided that I would abseil off the school building (along with a bunch of other people)... and I bottled out... I just got to the top of the roof, and watched the girl in front of me go down. She fell on her ass half way down, and I think this affected me more then it did her. When it came to be my turn I got into the harness, connected up all of the ropes, got to the edge of the building and looked over the edge... I think my foot slipped at this point and I made a sudden, and irreversable decision that there wasn't a chance that I was going off the edge of the school... I let my fear win...

The second event of this type was similar in many ways. But I didn't even let myself get to the edge. It was on the PGL adventure holiday with school in the south of France. There were maybe 40 of us canoing down the Ardeche (this could be spelled wrong) River, and we came to a place where there was a high rock that could be jumped off, into the river, with no real risk of injury. The rock was only about 10 meters high, so people started jumping off it. First of all the "hard" kids... then the ones with something to prove, then the girls, and some of the teachers... In the end EVERYONE except for me jumped off this rock... I made a decision as soon as I saw it that I wasn't going to jump off it... and I stuck with that decision... You may say it takes some moral character to stck to a decision like that in the face of everyone else telling me that I should do it... whatever you say, I didn't do the jump, and so mssed out on an unrepeatable experience...

As you can imagine... my inability to face my fears made approaching women impossible, and at least partly contributed to my having zero girlfriends for the first quarter century of my life...

Fast forwards to today... I made a decision in the past few years that I would say "YES" to the universe... That means accepting... even embracing... new experiences that come my way... And one of these experiences was bungee jumping! It is pretty much the ultimate experience in terms of facing up to any fear of heights, and the fact that you have to make the jump yourself made it the perfect test of my ability to say "YES"!

Luckily I passed with flying colours! The jump was 47m high, over a beautiful blue river. I didn't hesitate, just waited for the fella that tied my legs to the piece of elastic to say "1, 2, 3, GO!" and then launched myself into empty space... The feeling was exhilerating... A similar feeling that you get in your stomach when the roller coaster just start its plummet, but with nothing restricting you... You aren't even aware of the rope round your legs when you first jump, because it is all falling at the same speed as you!




I know you all want to see it... so here is the video...





Would I do it again? Definately! But hopefully someone else will pay next time! I think the next thing that I want to do to challenge myself is jumping out of a plane... In the meantime though... I'll just have to see what pops up...