Gigi's Jump for Joy
"Ask me to jump off a bridge and I'll ask which one. Ask me to jump off a plane and I'd gladly do it several hundred times"
I play with the wind and dance with sunshine in a playground of blue skies. I've touched clouds and seen the earth as a tapestry of colors. I've locked arms and made wonderful friends with strangers while falling at 120 mph.
I live life not on the edge but through its infinite spectrum of possibilities.
Skydiving is not a death wish, as most cynics would like to think. It is a thirst for life. It is relishing life and all that it offers. It is a means of exploring one's limits, strenghts and weaknesses. Jumping off a plane is not a show of fearlessness. It is not a denial of fear but an acceptance of fear. Accepting that it exists but that it can be harnessed and controlled.
Skydiving is not the greatest sport. Saying so would be challenging an entire deluge of athletes. Tennis players would say tennis is the greatest sport, basket players - basketball and golfers...well, I don't understand golfers. My wisdom and imagination cannot possibly go that far. But I digress.
Skydiving is a sport. The United States Parachute Association alone boasts of a membership of 33,664 men and women who reportedly made a total of 2,151,228 jumps last year. The group has a female to male ratio of 1:5 and is a mix of individuals that range from construction workers to medical professionals to housewives. The average age of skydivers is 35 and ranges from 16 to 72 years old.
Skydiving is a way of life. It has the ability to change one's perpective of life. Jumping out og a plane os a form of revalidation . It releases you from baseless childhood beliefs and opens your eyes to new truths.
Jump out of a plane and see how invigorating it is and know that you can never be too old or too female or too anything to date to do something you have always wanted to do. Scream, sing, dance, laugh and embrace everything that is around you. This is life, you are alive. Celebrate!
Skydiving has made me less worried about certain things I have no control over. This includes gravity and poverty. I have gone to the darkest, deepest dungeons of poverty and sold and hawked all of my worldly possessions, including ahusband - who I must say was quite happy to be pawned. Not including, however, my parachute rig. I have promised eternal devotion to my rig. It sleeps with me and we have long meaninggful conversations on weekends. My one true love, my true north, the one entity that will break my heart.
I am not braver than most and absolutely not more intelligent than average. I am just another girl, a Filipina to the core. I had a dream when I was child. I dreamt I could fly. In Paulo Coehlo's book The Alchemist, he wrote, "When you really want something to happen, the whole universe conspires so that your wish comes true."
The universe did conspire. I can fly. Come share my sky.
written by my sister Gigi for the Philippine Magazine STOPOVER, October 2003