Listen to this Article:
Jumping out of Airplanes
One Saturday afternoon I jumped out of an airplane from 19,000 ft. As I plummeted toward earth at terminal velocity, the Rocky Mountains dominating the curved horizon and the ground approaching at 120 MPH, my mind struggled to absorb the violent absurdity of this new experience – unsure if awake or dreaming.
Although I had been in anticipation of these moments for weeks, in less than ten minutes my personal momentum had gently reunited with Earth’s. The experience transformed from sensory overload into a cloud of strangely-implausible memories as the eagerly-awaited adventure tipped through coming into being into memory like the rushing of the wind.
Recounting the experience with co-workers the following Monday, someone asked if the jump had meaning. Had it symbolized something? Had it changed me? I suddenly found my mind cast backwards to those fleeting moments, building a web of connections between what I had experienced and my life as a whole.
Now, I find myself reflecting on how we anticipate, experience and assimilate the events of our lives… glorifying some, overlooking others, and forever grasping at “the meaning” of it all.
1. Anticipate
verb – to think, speak, act, or feel an emotional response in advance.
What do you have circled on your mental calendar? Big events? Vacations? Your future success and retirement… or maybe even a life beyond this one? Our culture lives in perpetual anticipation of a future that is always coming and many of us enjoy having big things on the horizon more than we enjoy those events when they arrive. We can make it through grueling hardships and over-worked exhaustion as long as we see “light at the end of the tunnel,” and to have “nothing to look forward to” seems a fate worse than death.
Generally, anticipation is the forerunner of happening. That is, as soon as we conceive, plan or act toward some known event, we project our minds and emotions into a time and place that is yet to be – able to enjoy, dread, swoon or sweat through moments that do not exist yet.
The word anticipate comes from the Latin anticipatus, which literally means “to take before” (anti/ante, before + capere, to take). So in a sense, when we anticipate, we take the thoughts and emotions of an experience before it has arrived.
I suppose this is well suited for a culture accustomed to living on credit, in that by anticipating we are indulging in the emotions of future events before we get there, much as we would buy a car before earning the money, and in both cases we pay with interest. With every excited daydream about “how wonderful this vacation will be” we take enjoyment ahead of time, only to find that when the actual event arrives we suddenly have to work to make our experience live up to our anticipation.
This may be why rigorous planners become frantic once their plans are in motion. Their interest in carrying out the plan requires a great deal of effort… so in the end what’s actually experienced is not the plan but the effort it takes. If you’ve ever come back from a vacation feeling like you need a vacation, you know what I’m talking about.
Now, I’m not saying that anticipation is bad… there are different flavors of anticipation, of course. I remember watching the clock tick out the last seconds of a school year before the bell announced summer, or being at the airport watching for a loved one to step off the airplane… such anticipation is free of expectations – an experience of bliss in itself.
Waking up on the morning of the jump, the anticipation had caught up with reality – and each moment was bringing me closer to that open doorway high above the earth. Then, all preconceptions were dissolved in experience.
2. Experience
noun – The feeling of emotions and sensations as opposed to thinking.
After so much anticipating – an act of thinking – the experience was like diving into an ocean of sensation: all encompassing and with little to grasp hold of. Arriving at the airfield, stepping into a harness, packing into a roaring airplane like aerial cattle… all unfolding in a seamless, almost thoughtless daze. Not a drunken, bleary-eyed daze, but a wide-awake-happening too quick for the mind to keep up. One moment I was hugging my wife, the next I witnessed my toes perched at the edge of a doorway into 19,000 feet of vertical space. Although thoughts arose within the experience, they could not contain it… the moment forever outrunning my mind.
Then, I was falling.
Thirty minutes later I sat eating lunch. Had any of this actually happened? It didn’t seem possible that I had plummeted from an airplane to arrive at that cheeseburger. The all-encompasing reality I experienced was now intangible, like a vivid dream lost upon waking. It had slipped by in a heartbeat.
Although jumping out of an airplane is a lofty experience, the daze I felt falling to earth was no different from the days I experience living there. Even the most ordinary experiences have a way of flowing past us like water beneath a boat, each moment emerging as if by magic from an ocean of possibilities – lasting only an instant – flowing from future to past in the blink of an eye with nothing in between.
Why is it that experience is so fleeting? How can days feel long yet years sprint by every time we stop to notice? Why can’t we hold on to the moment? People talk about “living in the moment” yet the actual moment – now – is a razor’s edge so infinitely narrow that nothing can exist there.
I use the word nothing (no thing) because “things” are created and held in our thoughts, but the experience of now happens before thinking, like the prow of a ship forever outrunning the boat that follows. Just as the leading edge of a boat makes a wake for the rest of the ship to pass through, the moment is the leading edge of experience that makes us awake – providing space for the mind to follow behind in its boat of thoughts – riding on an endless wave of happening.
When I jumped out of that airplane, my body was the prow – breaking through the roaring waters of experience as if strapped to the front of a speedboat. It’s an uncommon experience to have the breath swept from your lungs and the tears pulled from your eyes in a blasting crush of air… But this experience only served to call out the dream-like daze in which I live all the time.
Experience is fleeting because our thoughts follow moments. “Time flies” because thinking of time requires its passing. We can never hold on to the moment – by the time we think “now”… It’s no longer now.
I jumped out of an airplane. So what’s the meaning of it all?
3. Meaning
noun – the end, purpose, or significance of something
Mean: (noun) – the middle value in a collection of values
After eager anticipation, the experience had blown by as fast as the wind I’d fallen through. This absurd experience of raw elemental force had left me with little more than a handful of vaguely plausible memories and the privilege of adding skydiving to the category: things I’ve done.
Then, while sharing the story with coworkers several days later, my lovely friend Maria asked if the experience had meaning…
The question stopped me in my tracks. The very idea of meaning changed my whole mode of thinking. Was there a deeper significance? How did these events fit into the overall story of my life?
It seemed that the very act of searching for meaning created the possibility of finding it – and suddenly I found myself engaged in a process of reflection and analysis. Just by evaluating the significance of these new memories and concepts I was giving them value and relating them to my life’s history of ideas and experiences. My self image seemed to be at the center of this shifting web of values.
I realized that as much as I was searching for meaning, as if meaning was something an experience had – I was actually meaning my life’s experiences. Technically, a mean is an average – it’s the middle position in a collection of values. Meaning our lives is taking all our concepts and values and relating them to find the middle position where we are now. We have to mean our lives for our lives to mean anything.
For the most part meaning is thought of as a thing our lives have, but in this sense, “meaning” is a verb… It’s something we do. This turns the whole idea of “searching for the meaning of life” around, because rather than thinking of meaning as a fact to be discovered, meaning becomes a powerful process of personal re-invention.
There is liberation in this idea that by meaning our lives, we are the creators of our image of self and the world. We are not given fixed meanings that must be dealt with, we can change the picture any time just by thinking about it differently. Each new experience, big or small, is an opportunity to reflect on life and our meaning of it.
You don’t have to jump out of an airplane to find meaning… the living of our lives is the meaning of our lives.
The meaning of this article
I certainly did not anticipate writing this article when I added skydiving to my calendar many months ago, but I’m thankful that the dazed experience of plummeting to earth from thousands of feet has brought forth these new concepts and the opportunity to truly mean my life.
It seems clear that thinking of the future leads to anticipation – taking thoughts and feelings before an experience. Anticipation can be a blissful experience in itself or an invitation for expectations to hound us like debt collectors if our interest becomes how things should be.
Experience, on the other hand, is an inexhaustible flow of sensation that is perpetually outrunning our thoughts. We cannot hold on to experience, as soon as we have a notion of “now”, it has passed.
Meaning isn’t a thing, its the process of relating all of our ideas to create an image of ourselves and the world… one that is changing all the time. The meaning of your life today is not what the meaning was yesterday.
Now you have an opportunity to reflect and analyze, evaluate and relate these ideas to your life. Maybe these ideas blew your mind. Maybe this was just another bunch of noise and nonsense. That is entirely up to you.
After all, you’re the one meaning it all.
~r
Want to dig deeper?
Listen to the original ideas that lead to this article:
Cover photo credit: Laura Hadden
anticipate. (n.d.). Dictionary.com Unabridged. Retrieved May 10, 2015, from Dictionary.com website: http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/anticipate
experience. (n.d.). The American Heritage® Stedman’s Medical Dictionary. Retrieved May 10, 2015, from Dictionary.com website: http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/experience