[And yes, I resisted the urge to do the painfully obvious: J is for Johnny…Depp, Cash, Unitas, Appleseed, Travolta, Johnny- Billy- Bob- Collins, and my own Mr Brilliant, himself the penultimate (or, rather, ultimate) Johnny. Self-restraint of such a kind is, by the way, highly overrated].
And so, instead of the obvious Johnny, J is for Jump.
“Jump, and you will find out how to unfold your wings as you fall.” – Ray Bradbury
Today—not tomorrow, but today—is the day to jump.
I can feel it, like an old football player feels his knees when it looks like rain, like a mother in the Twinkie aisle at the grocery store with a child- who- is- screaming- up- a- lung feels it when you distract the toddler so she can run off to the South of France, like a mailman knows when you’re desperate for mail from your teenager who is at camp for a month but never remembers to send a sign that they are still living. I can feel the jump coming.
Jumping isn’t the same as falling, no. We fall all the time, subject to forces outside us (we think, we rationalize, we blame). Oddly, we fall by not jumping most times, I think.
I’m talking “jump,” not “bungee” nor “fall,” the latter an accident like that 29-year-old flight attendant swept out of an airplane emergency door that suddenly flew open, sending her to her death over Kansas and creating explosive fuel for my Pantheon of Irrational Fears, the other a deliberate and conscious leap. You don’t have to defy gravity so much as work with it, acknowledge it, own it, embrace it, use it. Make gravity your friend and falling after a jump is some kind of validation, not failure.
Today is the day to be like Fucchi and surprise gravity, let go of the monkey bars, jump to make ripples in small important circles, fling, fling. Your wings may burn in the heat of the sun like those of Icarus, but perhaps, as poet Jack Gilbert has written, “Icarus was not failing as he fell, but just coming to the end of his triumph.” And your triumph? Perhaps you have to jump to get there—Icarus couldn’t have come to the end of his triumph without first flying, could he?
Jumping comes from intention, and sometimes from intention without a direction—that is, we don’t know, sometimes, where we are jumping to, what we are jumping into, what we are jumping away from. In fact, feeling that we need to know all those things often keeps us from jumping—we wait too long until we know enough about how and where and with whom we will land. You can’t know. Jump anyway. Jump today. Perhaps you are jumping away from someone, or jumping into your own truthfulness. Your wings will either unfold or they won’t (they, too, our own invention) and either way, the view will be simply fantastic as you soar.
You’re never more than three minutes from the ground. And someone will catch you when you’re falling, the result of any jump. Who? [Perhaps you are capable of catching yourself. Go ahead, try.] You will no doubt fall into new lands with new wildlife and flowers you’ve never imagined, your parachute falling softly around you, creating a tiny Christo sculpture with you in it, bright yellow silk on green hills, pointing to your landing zone.
Jump, jump.
[And yes, I resisted the urge to do the painfully obvious: J is for Johnny…Depp, Cash, Unitas, Appleseed, Travolta, Johnny- Billy- Bob- Collins, and my own Mr Brilliant, himself the penultimate (or, rather, ultimate) Johnny. Self-restraint of such a kind is, by the way, highly overrated]. 
