This weekend was fairly run-of-the-mill. I hung out with friends, went to a couple of parties, pretended to do some homework.. Oh, and I jumped out of an airplane.
That's right, you heard me.
I went skydiving with Duke's Catholic Student Center, even though I am Jewish (I figured if anything were to happen, this way I'd have all my bases covered). What compelled me to leap from a small aircraft 14,000 feet up with nothing between myself and a grisly death but a thin piece of nylon?
Aside from the fact that I am a thrill-seeking bad ass, I also was very interested by an idea that struck me a few weeks ago: what is the best way to capture a once-in-a-lifetime experience?
Allow me to elaborate. There are moments in life we all experience that we know will only happen once. Whether it is the birth of a child, getting that perfect spot at the Carolina game after tenting for two months or even seeing a particularly spectacular view of the Duke Chapel framed by a blue sky, we all get that eerie feeling that we are literally living in a memory. We reach out with our senses, trying to grasp every sound, every smell, every tiny pixel of sight, greedily trying to hold onto an ephemeral moment. But there is not the time, or the brain space, to capture every gorgeous experience of our everyday lives..
But I digress. Back to skydiving.
So there I was, 14,000 feet up, about to plunge from a plane made in Africa that was about the size of a minivan and seemed to have a child's rendering of a jungle scene painted on the side. I was strapped to a scruffy old Vietnam War vet, who I fondly refer to as Tandem Master Randy. This dinosaur of a man has been jumping out of planes since '69, so to him, Saturday was just another day at work.
For myself, this was a moment I had been waiting for my entire life. A moment when I could do something truly daring, truly courageous; something that I could one day cherish on my deathbed (or, right before I smashed into the ground at 120 mph). The company I went with offered a service where you could pay $99 to have a photographer jump out of the plane with you and record you both on DVD and with still-shots. It seemed like a no-brainer: for a one-time fee, I could have someone give my brain a rest and capture the memories for me.
And therein lies the rub: does filming a moment enhance it, or ruin it?
To use an example that more of you can probably relate to, have you ever had that inner debate about whether to bring your camera to a Duke basketball game? Sure, it's amazing that we can capture shots of our friends with painted faces, of our favorite players warming up or of Tyler Hansbrough getting smashed in the face by Gerald Henderson.
But it can also ruin the game. Having to annoy your friends to pose for you, or fumbling with your camera while the entire crowd is jumping up and down, is irritating, cumbersome and detracts from the very experience you are trying to capture.
It was the same thing with skydiving. When I backflipped out of the plane into a 60-second free fall, I found myself focusing more on blowing a kiss to the camera man than on the fact that I had just jumped out of a plane. Before I knew it, Tandem Master Randy had ripped the chute, and my free fall was over and gone.
It all comes down to a trade-off: do you want to have physical evidence of an experience to cherish for the rest of your life, or do you want to be truly present in the moment you are experiencing? Is life the physical accumulation of experiences over time, or is it in each second, each individual moment that we are here on earth?
As we all learned from the movie Zoolander, the Aborigines believe that photography steals a person's soul. I believe that it steals the soul of a moment. While my $99 got me a digitally enhanced, soundtracked DVD of myself skydiving, I would pay every cent of it again, and more, to be back in that moment, free falling out of the expanse of a cool blue sky.
Because when you think about it, life is kinda like jumping out of a plane. You get a little nudge from your parents and then off you go into a chaotic free fall, praying that you have the inner strength and resources to open your parachute to guide yourself down.
But once you have that chute open, and are beginning the calm, quiet descent to the earth, all you want in the world is to be back in that terrifying free fall once more. That's when you felt most alive, when every second was thrilling, and new, and gone so fast. And while it is wonderful to reflect back on it, whether by photography or by memory, you always wish to God that you could have appreciated it just a little more, right then, in that moment.
Stacy Chudwin is a Trinity sophomore. Her column runs every other Friday.
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