JUST JUMP

How do you deal with fear?

In this short but sweet documentary, the author discusses fear and how we as humans relate to it. Enjoy.

Transcript

Confronting fear has always been a big part of my life and fear is something we all experience. On the most basic level, we fear death. We know that we can’t live forever and so we’re terrified of our death. We tend to assume our fears are logical indicators of what we should avoid in life and so we just avoid these parts of life. We label our fears, categorize them, and they grow in power. Just like mold grows in dark, stagnant places, our fears grow inside us.

True fearlessness isn’t the absence of fear. It’s moving beyond it. To move beyond it, you have to confront it, snuggle up to it, really make an effort to feel it, hold it. Behind the beating heart, the sweaty palms and nervousness of fear, you might find sadness, a sadness at the basic vulnerability of your life, the fragility of it. This is where every skydive starts for me. You got to just hold the fear close to you, recognize that you have it, and just jump. You’ll notice that when you do this, it’s impossible to think about anything else, doing your taxes, that bad relationship you had or whether you’re living up to your family’s expectations. You simply will experience the richness of life. I still feel fear before a skydive but it never follows me out the door. Sometimes, you got to just jump.