The Taste of Skydiving (again)

The taste of skydiving is lingering again for me. 

image courtesy of skydiving-granny.com

I know it has been a while since my last post on Out of the Blue, and I’d like to start off by saying, “It’s good to be back!” 

For lack of a better reason, my absence from Out of the Blue has been due to my lack of realistically achieving my goal that I originally stated in my first post, “Birth:” taking the jump and skydiving for the first time.

This has been something that I have yearned for for quite some time.  It has always seemed to me that skydiving would be the greatest thrill of a lifetime.  The ultimate rush.  The ultimate experience.  It has been something I have been craving, that up until last September, was only a dream. 

This was true until I enrolled in my Online Journalism I class, under Professor Mark Berkey-Gerard for my senior year of college at Rowan University.  He gave us a simple assignment to begin the semester: Think of an interesting topic for a blog.  A week later, Out of the Blue was born. 

To be honest, skydiving was not the first topic that came to my mind when introduced to the subject.  I originally thought I would just blow off the assignment and take the easy way out, and just blog about my woeful Dallas Cowboys and even more upsetting misadventures of my beloved New York Yankees.  But then I figured, “Why BS the project?  Why not create a blog on an interesting subject that I would like to learn more about?”  So, I did.  I took a subject that I always wanted to participate in and learn more about, and immersed myself in it over the course of my ’08 Fall Semester.

Over the course of the semester, my love for the sport grew by leaps and bounds.  With every fact that I learned about skydiving, my desire to achieve my dream intensified.  My fascination for skydiving had festered into a necessity, a need to achieve my goal and go skydiving.

It first appeard that I would take the plunge sometime around the end of my Fall Semester, right before Christmastime.  However, after an unfortunate chain of events, including being laid off from my job of over two and a half years, I was financially unable to achieve my goal.  It seemed, for the time, that my dream was dead (inserst sappy violin chord here).

With a new season, came new opportunities.  I recently found another steady job and decided that I didn’t want my dream of skydiving to only be a dream anymore.  I didn’t want to become one of those people to look back on their life and say, “If only I did this with my life.”  I wanted to know that I lived my life to my fullest and I wanted to  be unapologetically happy.  I wanted to live my life.  I wanted to make my dream a reality.

So, I started pinching pennys, cutting out unnessecary expenses and more importantly, putting a certain amount of money aside every week in my “skydiving fund.”  Currently, I am about 3/4ths of the way towards my goal.  With every penny saved, my dream becomes all the more realistic.  Seventy dollars more, and my dream will finally come true.

As I get closer to finally skydiving, I feel my emotions stirring in my body.  I anticipate the nervousness of taking off in the plane.  I start to second guess myself, thinking only a fool would choose to leap out of a perfectly sound plane.  I have these feelings and then I think to myself, to hell with fear: THIS IS THE EXPERIENCE OF A LIFETIME.  At that point, a smile begins to grow on my face, and I am happy