No.Nonsense.

My son’s birthday was this past weekend and we celebrated by in a unique way. I’m an older mom and my son’s sense of adventure takes me out of my comfort zone to do things I wouldn’t otherwise entertain. Indoor skydiving was the current adventure for this celebration. We had so much fun and that should have been enough. But as I was giving encouragement to someone close to me who’s going through a difficult time right now, I realized the experience had given me a life lesson as well. If you will indulge me, I’d like to share my thoughts.

When they were instructing us in how to enter the wind chamber, they said to raise our hands above our heads and fall forward into a face first trust fall. Yes, we had an instructor there, but it’s still hard to just let yourself go. You fall forward with no floor and only a strong wind to hold you up. You completely surrender yourself in that moment with nothing below to catch you.

Then you have to relax into the wind. The more you fight against it the less you will fly. It’s a struggle to hold yourself still and not resist but it’s necessary to make the experience a successful one. If you lean into it and let the wind carry you and just rest in the knowledge that it’ll hold you up, you won’t hit the bottom.

The feeling of weightlessness is amazing and you surrender yourself. You are held up by the wind that has the power to crash you if you allow it.

I watched the instructor do a demonstration where he literally flew to the highest point of the wind chamber only to plunge back down, inches from the mesh bottom but never touching. Then flying back up and hovering in the air with nothing but his body and the wind.

He was poetry in motion because he could relax and let the wind carry him.

There are times when we can feel buffeted by the winds of life, feeling as if they will send us into a tailspin. But when we can take a deep breath and relax our bodies, and lean into the wind, we can find ourselves flying instead of falling. We can give ourselves over to the gusts and let them carry us instead of breaking us.

We can fly.

I am reminded of a large storm that came through the area where I live several years ago, causing a lot of destruction. In the aftermath, our lives became about just getting the supplies we needed for living. After days of struggling for the most basic needs, I had a small inconvenience in having to postpone, of all things, a vacation. Our lives were upended and I lost it for not being able to go on a trip. As I was having my meltdown, a friend told me I needed to learn to bend.

He said that the palm trees in the coastal areas can withstand the hurricane force winds because they are made to bend while the oaks around here that are strong but stiff, are uprooted. He told me when the winds of life come to uproot you, if you can bend, you can weather the storm.

Same lesson, different day.

If we live our lives inflexible to change, we will inevitably find ourselves in the midst of the storm, fighting the winds of circumstance. We will resist and we will break. But if we lean in and let that same wind carry us into a new reality, we can learn to fly.