VIDEO: 3 Life Lessons I Learned While Skydiving in Mexico

“I’d rather regret the things I’ve done than regret the things I haven’t done.” – Lucille Ball

My grandmother always taught me that the way you end the old year is how you will begin the new one.

Since I had decided that 2015 was going to be the year of “fun, love and adventure,” I wanted to do something to honor that theme for my 32nd birthday on December 31, 2014 – the very last day of the year.

And that’s how I ended up jumping out of a plane in Playa del Carmen, Mexico!

I gave myself the gift of SKYDIVING, which was pretty much one of the scariest and most rewarding things I’ve ever done.

Check out the video of my jump below! I booked my tandem jump with Skydive Playa and they took good care of me throughout the process.

Now let me tell you…

It’s not real until you have to step out onto that little ledge of the plane.

The air is rushing into your mouth and you feel like you’re going to die and these are your last moments.

But then you jump and you DON’T die.

Instead, you free fall…

And everything gets so quiet and so calm and so peaceful.

You’re facing the sun and the water and the sky all at the same time.

All of a sudden, you realize that you’re not really afraid to die.

You’re just afraid that you haven’t LIVED enough yet.

These are the 3 life lessons I learned as a result of my skydiving experience:

1. You can’t achieve your goals until you take action. Skydiving had been on my “bucket list” for years, but I was just too chicken to actually do it until now. Like any big goal you have for your life, you can talk about it, write about it, dream about it and pray about it all you want, but it doesn’t really count until you DO IT!
2. If you don’t take a risk, you can’t reap the reward. If I hadn’t jumped out of the plane, I wouldn’t have been able to enjoy the absolutely breathtaking, once-in-a-lifetime view of Riviera Maya from 10,000 feet in the sky. The long-term reward is worth enduring the short-term feeling of fear. I’m glad I have video, but that view is something I’ll probably never forget.
3. The worst thing you can do is die wondering “what if…?” When we jumped out of that plane, I was terrified, no doubt about it. I thought I was going to die. But then I found myself thinking about dying. What would actually happen if my harness broke and I drowned in the Caribbean Sea? Well, nothing would happen. I’d be dead. I learned that what I was really worried about was that in death, I wouldn’t get to do all the things I had the opportunity to do – but didn’t do – while I was still alive.

I’m so grateful for this incredible experience and the lessons I learned that I can now apply to the way I live my life. 

And of course, the final moral of the story is that everyone should go skydiving at least once!

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