Felix Baumgartner, Jumping Off My Own Precipice, and You

Take a look at this if you haven’t:

Makes your palms, sweaty right?  That’s Felix Baumgartner, diving off a capsule from the edge of space down to Earth.  Crazy right?  If you watched this yesterday, you know that’s what CNN thought. They refused to televise any part of the jump, “Just in case.”  Skeptics were pretty certain it was suicide, and the Twittersphere was alive with comments about from people who’d tuned in to watch that very thing – a crazy guy kill himself.

But the weirdest thing happned.

HE SUCCEEDED.  About 9 minutes later, he landed – 45 miles off course, true, further than his team thought, even given margin of error, true, but he did it.

Feliz Baumgartner is now the fastest man alive.

I’m not going to get into a discussion on his sanity or question the morality of high risk takers or entertain whether he has a death wish.  Baumgartner wanted to do this jump, acquired a team and the backing of Red Bull, had a specially designed suit, sat down and did all the math and science involved with pulling this off – and then PULLED IT OFF.

And as I looked at that video, where he jumps into oblivion and in 4 seconds is barely a blip on the screen, I thought about my own life. A little over a year ago, I took a leap by quitting my job and going into blogging full time.  A little less than a year ago, I took another leap and got baptized.

I felt a lot like Feliz must have, standing on the precipice of that capsule, shushing the butterflies, because I knew this was absolutely the right thing to do.  I’d calculated the risk, balanced the equations of fear, checked my heart, swallowed my fears, and did what I was supposed to do.

If I was off course, it was because I had not been willing to let go.  My career was stuck in neutral until I committed to discarding web design wholly and completely. I didn’t do that until this summer – who knows where I’d be by now?

Back in January or December, my pastor’s wife told me she noticed great changes since my baptism, and I didn’t see many of them until recently.  My heart’s different, my head’s on straighter, and while I only thought that was a symbolic dedication for me and God, apparently it’s transformed me more than I thought.

Last week, I started an exciting new project, and I’m overjoyed and humbled by the thought that it came because I quite literally took a leap off the life I was living.  It’s not the first time I’ve done this, but this is not the kind of thing you cannot do often or carelessly.

I’d love to know, have you taken a jump off into the stratosphere of your life?  Made a change that others thought was crazy and would be the death of you?  Or are you on the cusp of one now?  I’d love to hear your stories.

Meanwhile, if you’re trying to find courage to make that change that you KNOW without a doubt you have to make, let me encourage you by telling you that ALL the major leaps in my life: jumping into freelancing, marrying Chris, deciding to have a baby, the baptism and quitting, have played out  by making me happier, wholer, and more grounded in life.  All I can say is:

Go for it.

Image by Arty Smokes, Creative Commons License.