Superheroes Welcome

caseysbdayCIMG1317, originally uploaded by marymactavish.

I’m typically a girl with a plan, a goal, a raison detre, if you will.

This sounds like a good thing, as it means I tend to accomplish a lot, but it isn’t always. When I don’t have a plan I tend to feel a little lost and purposeless, and I have limited ability to look at my life with any sort of Zen-ness. And when my plans don’t go the way I mean for them to – and it does happen that way sometime – I really don’t function well because the sense of failure tends to resonate around me.

(This is the soft underbelly of well-behaving over-achievers. I almost never got in “trouble,” which means the few times I did it, it felt like the end of the world, and I almost always succeeded in what I tried, which meant I did not have the necessary emotional fortitude to cope when I failed. Two sides, coins, blah blah blah.)

But anyway, back to plans.

A few months ago, while home with child o’ needles when he was sick, I was sitting on the bed, surfing around, listening for pleas for ginger-ale or mac and cheese, when a feature came on the news about 4 young men who were traveling the country trying to fulfill every goal on their own personal “bucket lists” and encouraging others to do the same.

And that thought stuck a while, and I hopped around websites wondering what sorts of things people might put on such a list. And I thought about what I wanted to do, and I was pleased that I had actually done a lot of those things. That, I suppose, is one of the bright sides of always having a plan.

One notable item that was not on my list was skydiving. Although it had been, once upon a time. As a child it was something I wanted to do, until I was old enough and then I changed my mind. As a woman newly-divorced I briefly sought intense experiences and considered this one, although more for being able to say I had done it than any true desire for the experience. Or, that’s not quite true – I really wanted to experience free fall, and I really wanted to experience floating over the earth in a parachute, I just really didn’t like jumping out of a plane and plummeting towards the ground part.

But then there’s this place here: www.iflysfbay.com

Which is a giant vertical wind tunnel. You can hop into the wind and feel, a bit, like you’re experiencing the free fall part.

The above photo is a group of intrepid birthday-party revelers who joined forced to celebrate my brother’s 40th. That’s me on the right hand side of the photo in blue doing the muscle pose.

For one minute and 12 seconds, two times each, we each stepped into the wind with an instructor and tried to maintain the right body position to stay suspended in the airstream. It was hard – the wind pounds at your shoulders, the noise is intense. But when you get your balance just right – there you are, floating, riding the wind. On my second go I found a really good position and opened my mouth to “whoop!” Bad idea – drool goes a-flyin’ if you do that, but that was funny and then I had hard time not laughing.

I’m really happy my brother wanted to do this, I had no idea such a thing even existed. And I love tasting life, taking big bites and testing the flavors (there are those who might argue that jumping into a wind tunnel instead of jumping out of a plane is actually taking a nibble so I could spit it out if I didn’t like it, and to those people we would say, “shut the hell up.”)

And right now, when the business is taking twice as long as I thought to set up, when I’ve hit my first major setback with the articles of incorporation, I needed this. I needed exhilaration, I needed to remind myself that I’m good at momentum, and that I am brave. Me and all the 10 year-olds there at the other birthday party.

But you know, these kinds of things are actually easier when you’re 10. You are blissfully unaware of consequences or failure. You can still be president, you can still be a zillionaire, you can still do anything on any list you could ever write.

It’s a lot harder at 42. But I’m trying.

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