“Why would you jump out of a perfectly good airplane?” is the question skydivers are constantly asked. This is where the term “wuffo” comes from.. I’ve written before about how by confronting our fears we learn about them, but that still doesn’t quite answer the question. Why put ourselves through this?
Imagine you have been locked in a room and blindfolded. Somewhere in the room, you are told, there is a pit that is deep enough that you will not survive the fall. While this sounds like the plot of a horror film, it is how I think about living with my fears. In this situation I can cower against the wall and hope that I never come near the pit, but I refuse to be restricted to such a small part of my space. Instead I am going to crawl around slowly until I have a complete understanding of the location of the pit, its edges, and every crag along its rim. By coming to understand the profile of the danger, exactly where it starts and ends, I can move throughout the rest of the space fearlessly. I cannot remove the fear, but I can come to know it so intuitively that it does not affect me.
I cannot conquer my fear, but I will not allow it to conquer me.
A few years ago my son started fencing, and this year he decided to engage in the sport more competitively. Fencing actually shares a lot with skydiving. Both require control more than strength, and both include a great deal of decisions and actions in a short amount of time. All sports are mental, but some are more mental than physical.
Fencing competitions can have narrow or wide age ranges, and can be local, regional, or national. My son’s club hosts a wide range of meets, so early on he experienced a surprise win and medal, and a field that outmatched him and eliminated him in the first round. His coach stressed that the goal was to learn to transfer his practice skills to a competition setting.
At a recent meet my son started out quite confident. He knew that one other fencer from his club would probably beat him, but thought he could take second place out of the field of 30. In his first match up, however, he lost 5 points to 1, and he didn’t win a single bout in the “pool” portion of the event. For the bracket portion, he was seeded last and eliminated in the first round. Despite all of this, his last few points were some of the best of the day.
My son is never going to be a great fencer, so why should he bother training hours every week and going to competitions? For the same reason that I continue to skydive. Understanding how you react in stressful situations and how you deal with adversity is one of the most important things you can learn about yourself. My son didn’t win that competition, but he rebounded quickly from his disappointment so he could perform at his peak despite it. As I wrote in another post, I rarely recover quite so quickly.
This post is dedicated to the memory of my friend Debbie Maline.
