A movie called “The Ice Storm” has a scene in it that always stuck in my head. A kid goes out to his iced over swimming pool and stands on the diving board which is covered in a thick layer of ice. He hefts his weight and flexes the board a bit. The ice cracks. He gets away with it and flexes again, just a little more this time. He does this a few times until he slips and almost falls in. Then he does it one more time.
I think of that scene all the time. It’s both good and bad. The bad is the obvious, “you gotta push it until something breaks” thought. I know half of you are probably reading this and thinking about how I always push things too far. But really, if no one ever pushed their boundaries, what would we learn? Where would we be? Discoveries are almost always made by people who are willing to think in new directions and by people that are willing to test the limits that are set upon them. Get in a boat and sail to the new world? Put a man on the moon? Electricity, radioactivity… The list goes on. All of them the products of people that tried new things, broke the established rules, pushed the boundaries of what was known at the time.
The unpleasant byproduct is that some people push through into dangerous territory even after then know it has no benefit. Some people just have to push for no reason and that’s when people get hurt. So really, how does this video NOT end in a SPLAT!?
wingsuit base jumping from Ali on Vimeo.
Leave a Reply