Everything up to and including the moment when I thought, Hey, if I turn around and retrace my steps right now it’ll all be downhill from here, and I can-oops! What the-Īt this point, I realized that it was time to calm what they call the “monkey mind,” a concept I read about once in an in-flight-magazine article about meditation, and how it can help prevent the “non-useful” feelings that lead to incidents of air rage. 00075 seconds of free fall, I saw the rest of my life flash before my eyes. This was odd, considering that I’ve never actually owned a car-but I did distinctly see an ’89 Toyota Corolla, which, now that I think about it, must have been my first rental, that weekend when I flew to Phoenix for a college friend’s ill-advised wedding.īetween five hundred and four hundred and fifty feet above the ground, I saw the entirety of the movie “Arthur 2: On the Rocks,” and had time to note, wistfully, that it was much funnier than I had remembered.Īround four hundred feet or so, I was struck by another metaphysical conundrum: What kind of person climbs four hundred feet up a sheer granite face just to write “You suck! Bababooey!” on an otherwise pristine boulder? Then I saw my first girlfriend, and then my first girlfriend’s mother (who was even hotter than the girlfriend). He was also falling through the air at a hundred and thirty-five miles per hour next to me, which seemed an unnecessarily cruel trick of the mind, considering that Steven had died a peaceful death of barking-induced throat cancer back around the time that my stepdad got wrongfully arrested for dog-kicking. I saw my first dog, Steven, when he was just a puppy. It seemed to go chronologically, but super-sped up. Very shortly thereafter, I remember falling past an actual mountain climber-his belt heavy with pitons or spitons or whatever they’re called-who watched me pass and exclaimed, “What the f-?”Īt this point, I realized that I was about to die, and that’s when my whole life flashed before my eyes. Which, honestly, I could have done without. Halfway through that last thought, I was jolted out of my ruminations by a tree branch slapping me in the face. “Does that ant realize he’s eight hundred and fifty feet off the ground, or does he think that he’s on the ground and he’s wondering why I’m falling sideways?” The almost laughable ineffectiveness of “wind resistance” in the real world, despite its being such a bugaboo for designers of cars and gay-looking competitive bicycle clothes. You notice the oddest little things when you’re nine hundred and fifty feet above the ground, having just stepped off the business side of a man-killing mountain. I was still puzzling over this during my first. All I remember is wondering when the hiking trail I was on would start to feature a less strenuous, “downhill” grade. Whether this classification is accurate or not I have no idea, as my fall happened when I was just going for a really long walk. A few months ago, I fell off a thousand-plus-foot-high sheer granite face that had earned a 5.14d rating on the Yosemite Decimal System index-meaning that it is one of the most difficult climbs known to man. They say that your whole life flashes before your eyes when you’re about to die, and I’m here to tell you that it’s true.
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