Monday, October 11, 2010

New activities and new technology can be daunting.

So whatever you do, do not attempt this at home without the aid of a trained professional.

Or this.

True confessions time: That last one scares the bejeebers out of me (the first one, not so much). I don’t even like to go across a bridge, much less jump off one.

Several guys in my office went sky diving one Saturday. All of them returned on Monday. Thanks be to God.

Their next group activity was a trip to Lookout Mountain outside Chattanooga, Tennessee, to do some hang gliding. Hang gliding, that’s where you jump off the side of a mountain and hope there are enough air thermals to hold you up.

I would rather have a root canal.

I am not particularly brave, nor do I think of myself as a pioneer. You do know how to identify pioneers, don’t you? They’re the ones with the arrows in their backs.

If I had lived two hundred years ago, I would most likely have stayed in Philadelphia. Given the choice of staying home and reading a book (apparently pretty scary in its day) or heading off into the wide open spaces out west where the prospect of having to circle the wagons and fend off attackers was very real, not to mention having to build your own house and grow your own food, I know which one I would have picked.

All of us, however, do something very brave each and every day. It may be the scariest thing of all.

We get out of bed and start another day. Without a net.

Compared to that, jumping off a bridge is child’s play.

3 comments:

  1. As the father of the bridge jumper, if gives me the heebie-jeebies just to watch. Having said that, I used to go parachuting when I was about the same age. Now I get vertigo on a stepladder. I think we become more aware of our mortality as we get older.

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  2. When they have hang-gliding competitions off Lookout, one of my cousin sells them parking space in a field adjacent to the one in which they try to land. I've watched them jump from on top of the mountain and below the mountain.

    I rather assumed that you were retired.

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  3. That screaming you heard, all the way over in GA? That was not the bungee-jumper -- that was ME, watching her fall! Ye gods and little fishes!

    Loved the "new" book-reading instructions video. Someone quite clever put that together, I'd say. Reminds me of why I resist installing a new operating system on my computer. Oh, wait -- that was the point -- wasn't it?

    Where DO you find all this stuff? IMWTK.

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<b>Always true to you, darlin’, in my fashion</b>

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