Skydiving is Enough

The time I went group skydiving and one of the people in our group broke out a tarot deck and tried to give us all tarot readings mid-fall.

I will never forget the time I went group skydiving and some guy in our group broke out a tarot deck mid-freefall and, gesticulating wildly for us to pay attention, tried to give full-on tarot readings to people in the group mid-skydive.

Once he got someone to float over to him to have their reading done, the wind took each card right out of his hands as soon as he tried to hold it up — and he’d mouth curses and futilely try to grab the now-long-gone card as if he hadn't expected this to be a problem.

I didn’t even try to have my reading done, and by the time we were halfway to the ground, all the guy’s cards were gone. He looked so depressed and embarrassed as he just fell through the air with his head down and arms crossed.

I guess how sorry I felt for him was tempered by how little chance of success his idea had ever had, and I tried not to pay attention to him for the rest of my fall. I just spun around and awed at the horizon and all the other stuff people do when they skydive.

When I landed, though, after I gathered up my chute in this windy meadow of tall grasses, I saw one of the tarot cards — I think it was the 9 of pentacles maybe — caught between two blades of grass — but I only saw it for a second before the wind snatched it away.

I watched it flit over the field then vanish on the other side of a hill. I crested the hill and saw the other folks in my group pulling in their parachutes. The guy who’d tried to do a tarot reading was pulling his parachute in too. From afar I watched him doing what we all had to do — no glamour, no mystery, and now, with no cards, no different than any of us — and he looked even more dejected than he had in the air.

I admit I have no idea what he was thinking, but I suspect he’d had the whole thing built up in his mind and was expecting to do something unforgettable, and now being reduced to the banality of reeling in a big nylon parachute after such a disappointment-tinged descent... was really a lot for him. His self-disgust was so palpable, even from across the windblown field, I tried to let something of a lesson sink in for myself, almost in sympathy with him.

If I ever was doing something, I told myself, that was already amazing like skydiving, don’t risk ruining it by trying to make it even more amazing. Skydiving is enough. That's why i keep this post-it note on my desk-side:

In case I’m ever over on the side of the desk, I’ll see it and remember. I was picking up a pen that fell there just now and saw it and remembered this happened, so I decided to share it, FWIW.