If you follow my personal or writer’s account on Insta, you would’ve seen this photo:
And as promised, here I am to recount my experience on a sky lift.
Mind you, I hate roller coasters, ziplines, sky diving, see-through elevators, the staircases with spaces between steps, helicopters, planes. Anything that takes me high up and I know how high I’m going.
Since then, I’ve come up with a coping mechnism. For one, I’ve realized I can tolerate being at a height as long as I don’t feel like I’m falling or feel I’m at the risk of falling. So sky diving is a definite no. I don’t care if I have a parachute. It ain’t happening.
Rollercoasters are a huge no.
Ziplining? I did it once. La Fortuna, Costa Rica. It was one of those moments in which everyone know I was scared but I didn’t say anything or feel anything or think about it until I got there. But by the second line, I loved it. Because I wasn’t falling. And I didn’t feel like I was falling. The incline was smooth and I felt like how I feel when I’m playing on the swings at the park back home.
I mostly kept my eyes closed, refused to spread my arms out and especially refused to ride alone.
But I ziplined. Without panicking.
And yesterday, I took a flight down here. I’ve take flights several times in my life now. I’m no longer scared of them, mostly because the window is so small, it feels as though I’m staring at the clouds and city lights on a TV. And I haven’t felt nearly enough turbulence on any occassion to get scared.
That, but there’s something else. Something I learned from my yoga teacher.
A few months ago, when we first learned the tree pose and practiced balancing, she told us two things. 1) To focus. Focusing helps balancing. Focusing helps calm thinking. 2) To sway. To go with the flow. If we feel a little wobbly on our foot, then it’s okay. If we fight it, there are greater chances that we may fall.
That helped a lot!
Not only have I gotten better at balancing, but I got better at calming down even in turbulance. If you’ve been a plane, you know that during take off and landing are when you experience this sudden jump or bounce. Rather than wishing it away like I used to, this time around I found myself taking a deep breath, releasing the tension in my bones, and letting my body sway with the plane.
But swaying on the Gatlingberg Sky Lift on which there is no belt and only a bar across the seat through which one can very well slip through if they go rocking around? Yeah that ain’t flyin’. And neither is feeling the Sky Bridge shaking (to no fault of the bridge. There were the occassional visitors, children, who didn’t realize the importance of not jumping. But luckily there was a guy with a mic intermittently telling people not to jump or shake the bridge. Good man. Good system).
When turbulence is unwarrented, that’s when I tend to start panicking.
So what then?
Rather than swaying, I find that focusing helps instead.
Focusing on a sight that doesn’t make me feel like I might fall. Because that’s the interesting thing about vision – even if you’re not actually falling, you may feel like you are or you might based on what your line of sight captures. Or at least, it’s like that for me.
On the way up the Sky Lift (which I survived by the way – no panic attacks), apart from tightly gripping the yellow bar in front of me with my left hand and the black arm rest with my right hand, I focused on the right side of the scene. It felt a lot better looking at that than down or up. It made the ride feel not as steep unlike looking at the line in front of me which made it look much steeper than it actually was.
On the Sky Bridge at the top? Looked straight ahead going one way and coming back. And tightly held on to the wires on the right side of me. I also made sure there was plenty of room between me and the people going around me so there was no possibility of me tripping.
And there was no stopping save for letting a few people pass around me. No stopping for pictures. None of that. Looked straight ahead.
So you’re gonna ask, then what was the point? If I’m not gonna look at the views and enjoy it. What’s the point of going so high up if I don’t want to see how high up I went?
Sometimes, the point is simply to do it. To do it and survive.
Coming down the Sky Lift was easy. I gripped the handles and talked to my baby bro and watched him take pictures and looked all around me. If I survived that far, I’d survive everything.
Anyways, gotta go, my next adventure, a helicopter’s, waiting.
