Walking The Edge
Author: Patti Cobian Issue: 2024-09-04
Walking The Edge
by Patti Cobian
My husband and I sat in the back of the IMAX theater, holding hands. His were sweaty, and for good reason: we were watching National Geographic’s new film, Fly.
The breathtaking documentary stitches together the unimaginable: go-pro footage of BASE jumpers scrambling up gravelly mountainsides to gain the beautiful (and darkly, if aptly, named) “exit point”, skimming the sides of enormous peaks and soaring through narrow valleys. Interviews with life-long Jumpers weighing out the pros and cons of happiness, fulfillment and the likelihood of an early death.
We, the viewers, are given the opportunity to ponder alongside them as they experience the highest highs of freedom and beauty, the near-misses, and the heartbreaking not-misses. We watch athletes grapple with these questions as children are born, community members die, and near-death accidents force them to spend months reflecting on what it is that really keeps them going.
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I wondered what makes some of us different from others — what gives rise to such a thirst for the perilous? Are we born into this life still carrying the weight of dull, drab lifetimes we’ve lived before? Might our soul be remembering imprints of past oppression, persecution or imprisonment, and such longing for freedom is just the karmic balancing of some great, cosmic scale? Or is the thirst for dangerous thrills simply another, predictable manifestation of an errant nervous system?
My husband and I left the theater with heightened adrenaline and heavy hearts. On the drive home, I found myself thinking of the episodes of Queer Eye: We’re in Japan! we had recently watched together. Even amid the cross-cultural faux-pas and language barriers, something about those episodes seemed to come alive as I held the spirit of these questions, but it wasn’t until later that I was able to understand their parallel.
Though the context and landscapes of the two might appear to have very little in common, in both Fly and Queer Eye, the subjects explore what it means to make their insides, outside.
Be it a wingsuit or a new wardrobe, the subjects are asked to reckon with the costs of repressing, hiding or otherwise stifling the expression of some part of their nature. Both stories highlight what might be considered “opposite” sides of some imagined spectrum, but what struck me most was their similarity.
I would imagine that a sport like BASE jumping makes headlines (in part) because of its startling proximity to risk, death and dying. “How could someone do that? How could they be so selfish?”.
Now, I am left to ponder the inevitability of death when we refuse to make our insides, outside, no matter the medium. The slow suffocation of individuality and sparkle; the predictable deterioration of mind, spirit and body when we learn that it is not safe to express parts of ourselves. Cancer, autoimmune disease, depression, suicide, homicide; how many deaths might be mistakenly attributed solely to faulty biology?
Now, there is a heaviness in my heart once more as I consider the invisible body count from all of those lifetimes lived without the safety, the tools, or the permission to express.
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- Patti Cobian (author)
- 2024 (year)
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