The fall
I sprinted as fast as possible, given such a short available distance. Then I leapt. As high and as far as my body could muster. I literally ‘threw myself into it.’ Across a crevice.
In peril, time stands still. Micro-seconds are like minutes and your thinking is like lightning.
Mid-flight, I realised I wasn’t going to make it. I could see my feet were going to arrive just short of the other side, so I rapidly adjusted with a new plan to simply get some sort of foothold on the ledge I’d suddenly spotted on the opposite wall. I would use my arms and hands to grab the top of the cliff.
It worked. For just a moment.
The gravity slowly pulled me off centre and my hands and arms slipped. I’d lost hold of the rock and was pivoting backwards. The cliffside seemed to pull away from me.
I plummeted.
The ground approached in slow motion. Strangely, I could see my knees moving past my ears. My head gently hit the soft, brown soil, perhaps somehow slowed by the angle of the slope between the walls. Those fine differences between standing up and walking away, or those worse options like death, head injury, or paralysis.
I survived and yelled to the top, “I’m OK!”
My friend abandoned punching that third and final digit of our emergency services phone number, pale and aghast at the shock of what he had witnessed. Equally traumatised. It was near-to-death, in a moment.
That day was born of adventure. Of curiosity. We wondered about this uncharted territory. We found a place, seemingly secret. We saw the crevice, and simply wondered. You see, that gap looked achievable, but also just challenging enough to beg the question… is it possible? I thought it was. As you now know, it most certainly wasn’t, at least not for me at that time.
My calculations were not unfounded. In my teens and twenties I was a passionate climber, bushwalker and outdoors lover. Ten years had passed since those weeks and months making ascents at Arapiles, Frog Buttress, and Booroomba Rocks. I’d forgotten that I was no longer ‘current’ or ‘competent’ in the ways I once was.
It turns out humans are not very good at calculating risks.
I’m reflecting on my unforgettable error, and admitting to it here, stimulated by a recent Saturday night watching what I thought was a climbing movie — yet turned out to be a story about life and death, about rational and irrational fears, and how we humans make risk-based decisions.
I highly recommend this one and a half hour film from 2019, even if you have no interest in rock climbing or mountaineering. The movie is called ‘Fine Lines’ and should be available on YouTube as a free movie from Gravitas BEYOND LIMITS (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L3cDxYoIvDU or you can find more information here https://www.imdb.com/title/tt10826186/ ).
To illustrate the contemplative power of the narrative, from just one segment, here is a quote from one of the protagonists, Steph Davis:
“…the human brain is not very good with risk. I think that’s partly based on our evolution, and what’s happened to us as humans in the last 200 years. With the advent of so much technology, so much change from the preceding thousands of years, there’s so much attached to safety and sustainability in terms of being careful in trying to provide for what you think might happen and taking a lot of precautions. And then there’s also just luck…
…we see standing on top of a cliff as very very dangerous and we’re extremely upset about that. And then we go back and we drive the car, and you know everyone drives cars so our brain now thinks that’s okay, and we just don’t do a very good job at really rationally and objectively understanding risk.”
We are always at risk, in every moment of our life. We are always thinking about risk, both rationally and irrationally. We imagine we can somehow cheat death. Sometimes we can. Sometimes, for no apparent reason, we cannot.
Learning about acceptable risk is important at an individual level, for survival. It is also important at a societal level. Without fear-mongering, some factors have changed in recent years that bring new variables into the equation on our survival as a species.
Are we humans equipped to make sound decisions about risk at this time, particularly when technology has seemingly accelerated in a way that even the experts closest to it don’t understand?
Is it really wise to leap into the unknown?
