Death and being on a Zipline.

Three years ago, I decided to quit writing. No pun intended, but I believed that chapter in my life was over. I had made this decision privately, and had not spoken to a single person about it. At that time, pre-pandemic time, I felt that I had lost my spark a bit (more on that in later posts). Plus, there was no real need to announce it to anyone; after all, this was my life and my decision. And my decision was to pack it all in, travel the world, and find the new me. The new non-writer me.

So I started off by visiting a zip-lining adventure park. As you do.

When you attend a zip-lining adventure park, you are given clear safety instructions. I was given mine by an employee who looked like he was about ten. We were told that there were two hooks; to harness yourself in safely, you hook into the wire once, then twice, then you pull both hooks to make sure you are safely secured before you jump off a tree.

Fine by me.

So I do it. I climb to a platform, hook myself in twice, give them a good tug and off I go. And the more I do it, the better I become. And for a person whose confidence in life was a little delicate, the experience of behaving like a Lumberjack for the day was a real boost. In fact, the more I climbed, the more I felt like I could handle anything. At one point, I was passing each platform so quickly that I found myself completely alone. I was never fond of being alone in life; I preferred the company of people and animals, but this was the new me. The reinvented me: Karen the globe trotter; Karen the adventurer; Karen 2.0. Once I reached the highest point, and the longest line, I took a moment to take it all in. This was a new thing I was also doing too: being mindful. So I mindfully appreciated the sunlight that was touching the fields in the distance, the trees that were dancing ever so slightly in the breeze, the birds that were singing lovesongs to each other, the trickle of a stream that was flowing nearby… it was just me and the world and the world liked me and I liked the world and I was strong and independent and absolutely fine with just being me. Not writer me. Just me. No labels attached.

And so I hook in once, then twice, and off I go. For the first few minutes, it’s exhilarating, but few seconds into the longest line, I hear the clunk of metal: one of my hooks fell off. Apparently, I did not pull on the hooks before the big jump.

Oh shit. I am going to die.

With one hook between me and being the human equivalent of a pancake, I look around again. And while I see it with the same serene and mindful beauty as I did a few seconds previously, I realise how perfectly balanced life truly is. In reality, we are always travelling on a one-hooked zipline; we are always teetering between life or death, happiness or sadness. We can’t have one emotion, or circumstance, without the other, and as I (slowly and rather painfully) whizzed by the singing birds and the dancing sunlit trees, I knew that’s exactly how everything is meant to be. And in that moment, there was nothing I wanted more than to write about life, its beauty and its ugliness in equal measure, because I figured it is mildly amusing and, you know, people may relate.

So I bargained with that hook: I promised if it would hold on long enough to not send me spiralling into Ghosthood, that I would take the time I needed to grow up, but I would return to writing. I wasn’t quite ready to stop: there were a few chapters left to go.

(Spoiler: I survived and felt like a rockstar).