“Sometimes you have to be up really high to understand how small you are.”  Felix Baumgarten

The Moro reflex is considered to be the only unlearned fear in human newborns. The gravity is considered to be one of the four powerful forces that mediates human experiences while the quantum gravity is still a bit of a theory problem.

I remember perfectly my micro free fall and indescribable feeling of going ‘up’, similar to the feeling of a plane taking off. The basket of oranges fortunately break my fall and not my spine. Mum left it there at ‘landing point’ the previous evening. She said she wanted to move it but something ‘told her’ to leave it there. The moment I begun to free fall my fear vanished. I became aware that I’m now dying at the age of 7 and posted my last thoughts to someone:

1. Oh fuck, already at 7
2. How will my class buddies do without me?
3. I’m off to happy hunting ground (saw it as written on a blackboard)
4. See, I knew there’s no point in screaming (those movies’ scenes of falling really irritated me)

Kids have not yet developed a strong ego as adults have. I guess that’s why is simpler for most of them to accept the notion of dying. One of my friends who is a psychiatrist tried to convince me that kids at young age cannot be aware of or ‘know’ what death is. With all do respect I say most psychiatrists do not know much about conscious, brain and mysteries in general. I know that my mind and body were perfectly aware of its end. Period. The shock came after my body performed a back-lift and landed perfectly into oranges. For a half a minute I could not inhale properly and that was a bit scary, not the fall.

Since than I started to perform jumps to reach the feeling of that free fall. During summer I would jump off from high cliffs in sport shoes cause hitting the sea surface with bare feet is quite a burning sensation. In winter I would jump from first or even second floors/balconies to land into a sand. It these cases it was very important knowing how to land and how to use your knees as shock absorber. Otherwise, don’t try.

Somebody asked me once if I’m an adrenalin junkie. It was not about adrenalin but about that feeling of utter relaxation and the feeling of going up. It’s difficult to explain. Still today when I ‘free fall’ into sea I like to close my eyes to feel gravity pulling my physical body down while something else is pulling ‘me’ up at once. Quantum physics at its best. To express it poetically, the silent fall of a falling leaf.

As a person who had several near death experiences I tell you death is not to be feared. If anyone of you ‘get lucky’ to die via free fall, try to relax, get a sense of an adventure and enjoy it cause there’s actually nothing else you can do. I’m not being sarcastic, ironic or perverse. If you look at it a bit closer, life as we know it is hell for most parts of it. Death only comes as a salvation.