Written by Chuck, Sept. 9, 2008

“You’re a dreamer, that’s your problem” was a common refrain from my grandfather. As a boy of nine, I always interpreted the remark as a compliment. It meant that I thought big thoughts, dreamed big dreams, and that maybe somehow, I could inspire people. In reality, at least his reality, it meant that I spent a lot of time wishing for the impossible, and pointing myself in directions that were ill-conceived and inevitably doomed.

I once had a manager that said my greatest strength was my ability to “parachute” into any situation and very quickly get a handle on it. He had no idea how true that insight was. When I was nine years old I jumped from a 3 story window with a hefty-bag over my head for a parachute. There may be no single experience of my life that so accurately depicts both my strengths and weaknesses, and proves my grandfather possessed a profound wisdom.

On my 9^th birthday I was sitting in my bedroom with my best friend. Michael Foley was a boy who was my age but a year behind in school. His parents had kept him back a year because teachers considered him immature for his age. Michael may have been immature but he was not stupid. When he was 11, he explained that he did not need to learn multiplication tables because if you wanted to know the product of two numbers, all you had to do was find the number exactly in between them, square it and then subtract the square of the distance between one of the original numbers and the middle number. Or 11X9 = 10^2-1^2. He told me this without ever taking his eyes off of the Dukes of Hazard re-run he was watching. It was a show which Michael watched religiously.

We were unusually calm in my room that afternoon, likely suffering from low grade insulin shock after consuming a mountain of birthday food. As we rummaged through my closet looking for anything that might excite us I found an object of infinite possibilities. A Hefty bag. The hefty bag could be used for so many things. When I was 7 my mother made me a frog costume out of a garbage bag and some tights. I hated her for that. That day however, in the bowels of my closet the dreamer in me looked deep into the spectrum of possibilities and found something sublime.

I was always fascinated with flight. I built and launched model rockets from my back deck with enough frequency to get a disciplinary visit from the local fire chief. My room had any number of model airplanes hanging from the ceiling in still life dogfights. When I was six I could imitate the sound of a jet so well that my mother would have me perform the feat for her friends regularly. However, on this day I was going to make the leap, literally, from toys, and motionless plastic to real, body off the ground, flight. The idea was so beautiful in its simplicity. Boy jumps from window with bag over head, bag fills with air acting as a parachute, boy lands safely on the ground. Why not?

Actually, Michael would tell me why not. He spoke the words as he was driving my toy General Lee around the border of the bedroom carpet. “That’s a bad idea. You are too big and the bag is too small. Real parachutes are much bigger than that …” and so on. Michael, despite his “immaturity”, was a detail guy. The evil, antithesis of the dreamer. Detail guys are the ones who always have the argument for “why not.”

In my mind, however, I was already out that window and floating my way to neighborhood immortality. This would be the first of many times in my life that I would gamble more than I could afford to lose on a fundamentally flawed logic. Dreamers are enamored only with the possibility of what could be. Little details like, Newton’s laws of motion, are often ignored as they tend to place unwanted and tedious boundaries on the landscape of infinity. In the evolution of humanity, dreamers are likely responsible, for things like: forced cannibalism due to being caught in a high mountain pass by a blizzard, zeppelin explosions, and most traffic accidents. We are also responsible for exploration, the innovation of drinking cow’s milk, and Jedi Knights. It’s probably a wash in terms of our overall social contribution. So there I was, just another dreamer riding that fine line between the Titanic and the moon landing.

Undaunted, I crawled out on the window ledge and leapt. I remember this moment very clearly. This was the first time I experienced a feeling that would reoccur many other times throughout my life. It was one moment of being absolutely confident in my perspective and then in the next, realizing that my view of the universe was completely misguided. Unfortunately, I am usually granted this clarity after passing a point of no return such as jumping from of an open third story window. I know now, that according the principles of gravity, there is no such thing as “hanging” in space. You are either rising or falling. However, I am quite sure, there was a split second of Wiley Coyote stasis just above my window sill. In that moment, I saw the world more clearly than I ever had before or have ever since. The truth was revealed to me. And then I fell like a brick. I zipped right past my mother, who was having coffee with a friend at the kitchen table. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw her baby careen by the bay window desperately waiting for the hefty bag to deploy. It was a miracle that I crashed into my father’s prize rhododendron and it broke my fall.

I lay there on my back, in the crunchy brown grass of my backyard, waiting for the shock of the fall to wear off and the searing pain of some broken limb to begin. I looked up and saw Michael in his “Nuke the Ayatollah” tee shirt looking out my bedroom window, his face contorted in fright. I heard the sound of my mother’s windbreaker pants rubbing against themselves in a high pitch swish as she ran to me and the sound of our neighbor’s voice screaming that she was calling 911.

The pain never came. Somehow I landed without any injury at all. I have friends now that swear my parents performed some magical incantation over my crib at birth that protects me from similar errors in judgment. However, a feeling that would become quite familiar over time did come to me. Embarrassment. I knew the news would travel fast and soon every friend’s house that I went to play at would become a slightly colder place as parents would not want “that crazy Rubin kid” hanging out too long.

That’s my conflict. I have the ability to imagine what’s possible in a hefty bag but I am generally bored by small details like, trash bags are not parachutes. It is what I love and hate the most about myself.

It has been almost 30 years since that summer afternoon. During that time, I have taken on all of the baggage of adulthood: responsibility, caution, planning, and fear. I have learned from the experience on the window sill and many others like it, that dreaming, spontaneity and impulse can be the assassins of success. However, success by most people’s definition, can feel like unwanted gravity. There is often an unbridled joy in leaving a crater in the ground. It comes from the freedom of the moment. A moment that is free of judgment. It is that theoretically impossible instant when you are neither rising nor falling.