Parker Badger

I travel because I would rather discover more knowledge about the world than let my mind dwindle in one domestic space. But I am no ordinary traveler. I sat on the edge with my legs dangling approximately 15,000 feet. “Ready?” my instructor rhetorically asked. I silenced my sanity and eliminated any remaining fear. There was no time for a one last deep breath. “One. Two…” I dove into the nothingness for sixty seconds of pure exhilarating freedom. At fourteen years old, falling into air can be pretty scary, but I live for challenge; I wanted to know what it was like to be Peter Pan. Flying over The Great Barrier Reef was the fastest yet most memorable of all my traveling endeavors. The best way I can describe it is more like sky-floating instead of sky-diving; in fact, it doesn’t feel like a dive or fall at all. But “floating” is not the point of my story. The most important thing I learned from this experience was that it’s really not about what happens when you are sky-diving, but more about the strength it takes to literally take a leap of faith. Similarly, I exercise diving into new and unfamiliar activities in my everyday life to further my worldliness. Metaphorically, we can all be pushed out of plane and be forced into the unknown, but not all of us will voluntarily take that leap.