Re: [Atle] I survived base jumping. How??
Atle,
I have tremendous respect for you, and i agree and resonate with every word you've said here.
Here's a bit i've posted in reply to Anniken's blog "How do you fill that void?" (http://annikenbinz.wordpress.com/...-that-void/#comments) in May:
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I’ve struggled with the same question for the last, uh, 5 or 6 years. What to replace BASE with? Worse yet, in my case i have already replaced the usual BASE with mountain wingsuiting long time ago – can’t even remember when i did a slider-down… anyway, this question has been burning in my mind all this time while i was still jumping. Slowly, the answer is shaping up, though – to the point where i hope i will just stop jumping (we will see this summer! ;)
The answer lies in a brief moment where we push off the edge and fly. I slowly realized it is this moment that i want to live in again and again… all the endorphine rush highs etc are just minor side dishes to this living in a moment. Same thing samurais would talk about, or just about any eastern philosophy is based on. Anyway, i’ve been doing more and more serious yoga over the last 3 years, and for me personally it begins to bring this “living in a moment” into ordinary life. Nowhere near perfect yet, but there’s hope and plenty of happiness, quite unexpectedly. I feel you can find it on many different paths, but they all lead in a roughly the same direction. Buddhism (as a practical path more than religious aspect) leads there, yoga goes there (real yoga, not a stretching class in a local gym) etc etc – you can pick for yourself…. but look at this feeling of being 100% alive and free when you fly away from the cliff, and investigate. This feeling and this moment is with us all the time, but incredibly difficult to dig up – usually we have to be pushed off the edge Trouble is, when you actually do jump off the edge, your senses adjust to such a scale that nothing external will ever replace it. The only way to feel so intensely alive is to look inside you… and it’s already there, it’s always been there and supposedly always will
Good luck! You don’t have to “just accept that”. You cannot replace BASE, but you can outgrow BASE ;)
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Well, a few months have passed since, and i can tell with a reasonable degree of confidence that i did outgrow BASE. I didn't quit - there's nothing to quit, really. I've simply realized that i didn't jump off anything in the last 12 months - because there's no need, no urge to do it. I feel very happy and whole as it is, and whatever BASE used to deliver by truckloads is already here with me all the time. There is no void to fill. I really truly wish that everybody finds this kind of happiness within during this lifetime - in our context, before they go in!
Given a right time and place, it still could happen that i fall or fly off something - but i won't be putting any effort into it, and usually things just don't happen without a conscious effort ;-)
BASE is a great and powerful tool. So is a chainsaw: you can build a house with it, or cut a foot off in a millisecond. Use your brain to the max, listen to yourself, notice the right moment to put your instruments down when the house is complete, and may the force be with you! ;-)
Party on! Yuri.
