2018 was one of the best periods of my life. It was also one of the most embarrassing though I did not know the embarrassing part until much later.
I had recently ended a relationship I should not have ended. With the woman who is now my wife, actually. But at the time, she had moved on. She had a boyfriend. I had an ache in my chest that had not shifted in months and a YOLO energy that was making some questionable decisions on my behalf.
So naturally, I jumped out of a plane.
The plan that started as a joke.
My sisters and I had been talking about a trip for years. Dubai kept coming up. Every time we were together someone would say: we should really do Dubai. And then life would continue. The following year someone would say it again.
In 2018, something different happened. We were having dinner together and the conversation came up as usual. This time, instead of letting it dissolve, I opened a WhatsApp group that same week.
I named it “Siblings Destinations 2018.”
That was all it took. Within the first week, both sisters had their tickets. I did not yet have the money so I borrowed K5,000 from a friend, bought the ticket, and sent proof to the group. There was no turning back. Once the ticket exists, the trip exists.
This is probably worth pausing on because it has become one of my most reliable lessons: a trip that people talk about for two years can happen within one month once somebody creates the WhatsApp group.
We flew Emirates over the Heroes and Unity Day long weekend, four days, with leave either side to make it count. I had only ever been on Kenya Airways. The difference was noticeable. I had WiFi. I had more movies than I could watch. I was also aware in a way I hadn’t been on previous flights that this was already working. We had stopped talking and started doing.
The part I paid for with an iPhone X.
When I had been researching Dubai activities, I came across Skydive Dubai. I watched the videos. I read about it. I looked at the prices.
And then, before the sensible part of my brain could schedule a meeting to discuss the matter, I paid for it.
Right there. From Kitwe. Months before the trip. No consultation, no spreadsheet, no sleeping on it. Just a man and a payment screen and a very brief window before common sense returned. I knew myself well enough to know that if I closed that tab, I would open it again six times, read the same reviews, and still be reading them when we landed in Dubai. So I paid. Immediately. Irrevocably. With the specific energy of someone locking a door and throwing the key into a river.
That payment came at the cost of an iPhone X I had also been planning to buy while in Dubai. The one with no home button, the full OLED screen, the Face ID that everyone was talking about. The phone that in 2018 felt like the thing to have. I chose the skydive instead. And looking back, I am grateful for that trade every single time.
At the time though, the person I most wanted to impress was Pauline, the woman I had let go and was trying, with limited success and quietly, to win back. She loved adventure. She was the kind of person who would understand jumping out of a plane. I arrived in Dubai with an idea of who I was performing for. Though if I am honest, there were other reasons I needed that trip too, reasons that live on a different page entirely.
4am and the only Black man in the room.
My sisters knew I was going early. When I told them the departure time, little sis wished me all the best and went back to sleep. That was the correct response.
I woke up at 4am, put on my new Dubai clothes, bought during the trip, naturally and got a cab to Skydive Dubai.
When I walked in, I looked around the waiting area. Whites. Some Chinese. Indians. Several other nationalities I could not immediately place.
No other Black person anywhere.
I was the odd one out and I was very aware of it.
A woman came to take a short video of me before the jump — name, where are you from, why are you here. I answered. Watching it afterwards, I can tell I was nervous and not saying nearly enough. I gave brief answers and looked slightly startled, like a man who had just realised he had paid in advance for something that was actually going to happen.
Then my instructor arrived.
He was Filipino. Cool in the way that action heroes are cool, unhurried, completely unbothered, the kind of physical presence that makes jumping out of aircraft look like something reasonable people do before lunch. He took me through the procedure. What to do, how to hold my body, how to land. I listened carefully, as an engineer does, and retained approximately none of it.
We walked to the plane.
The last three seconds before everything changed.
There is a moment, just before you jump, that I was not prepared for.
You have been inside the plane. The plane has climbed. Everything has been going in a logical sequence of events. You are with a group. There is noise and movement and things happening.
And then you are at the door.
And it is open.
And there is nothing outside that door except Dubai, very far below, and sky.
My instructor shouted over the wind. Counted from three. And before I had finished processing what three meant, we were out.
My heart. I am not sure it was beating. For a moment, I think I may have briefly stopped existing.
The freefall is fast. Genuinely fast. The kind of fast that your body has no category for. Everything I had been carrying; the plans, the ache, the performing, the waiting. Gone. There is only this. The wind. The speed. The altitude. The absolute, undeniable realness of the present moment.
He released a small parachute to slow the descent. I felt it catch. He tapped my shoulder, my signal to start moving, to look at the camera, to be the person in the video.
I pushed my arms out wide. The camera operator appeared from somewhere. I made poses I cannot quite explain but which felt, in the moment, like the only reasonable response to being suspended 4,000 metres above the earth with Dubai laid out below me like a map.
And then he released the bigger parachute.
It brought everything to a sudden, gentle, floating stop.
Something ran down my face. I will not try to name it. I am not sure I have the right word for what happens when your body encounters something so far outside normal life that it simply responds the only way it can. I was not sad. I was not relieved. I was just there. More there than I could ever remember being.
I landed. I lay on the ground and shouted. I did not care who was watching. The embarrassment centre of my brain had taken the morning off.
She wasn’t even checking.
When I got back to the hotel, my sisters were waiting. I described every detail. They were proud, excited, wanted to see everything.
That evening, I shared it on my WhatsApp status. The response was extraordinary. People I barely knew were sending messages. Strangers said I had inspired them. Friends told me I was crazy in the best possible way.
I checked to see if Pauline had viewed it.
She had not.
I am laughing about this now, writing it down. The universe has a way of making a point.
She saw it eventually, much later, after everything between us had changed. She had something to say about it, of course. She always does. But that is a story for another day.
What the freefall was actually teaching me.
That season, 2018, was the year I started doing things for the first time. Something had cracked open and I had stopped waiting for the right conditions to start living.
That year held more firsts than any year I can remember. The Dubai trip itself, first time out of Africa, first time on Emirates, first time standing in a desert. The skydive, a first of a different order. Then the family reunion we finally pulled off, cousins and relatives all in white tees and blue jeans, dancing in a circle at midnight to Omunye, to Tyoka, to every song that had no business hitting that hard in grandma’s yard in PHI.The team building I planned with my work mates that took us all the way to Siavonga; camping on the shores of Lake Kariba, a campfire, music carrying across the water, the best night in that chapter of my professional life. Concerts. Road trips.
I had always been a man with plans. The next qualification. The next promotion. The next rung that would finally deliver the feeling of arrival. I wrote about that pattern in an earlier article, Whose Plan Have You Bought? The way we absorb other people’s definitions of success and spend years running inside them, certain that the next milestone will be the one that finally settles things.
What 2018 cracked open was not another plan. It was an appetite. For firsts. For showing up fully to the life that was already here.
Two accounts. One life.
Jim Rohn said something I have carried for years: life is a collection of experiences, their frequency and intensity.
I had read that line and thought I understood it. And in one sense I was collecting qualifications, titles, milestones. A degree is real. A promotion means something. But there are two separate accounts, and achievements only go into one of them. What you actually live goes into the other. And for a long time I had been putting everything into the first while telling myself the second would fill itself up eventually after the MBA, after things settled down, when the time was right.
The second account does not fill up on its own. It only grows when you deliberately show up for it. When you create the WhatsApp group. When you pay before common sense talks you out of it. When you get on the plane at 4am and walk to the door.
The freefall above Dubai was less than three minutes. It cost me an iPhone X, a borrowed K5,000, and a 4am taxi ride across a city I had never been to before. What it deposited into the second account permanently, irrevocably, beyond the reach of any bad week or difficult season, may be the best investment I have ever made.
That second account is the one you will think about when things go quiet. Not the certificates. Not the titles. The door at 4,000 metres. The knee on the sand at Lake Tanganyika. The dancing in the yard at midnight. The ninety five year old grandfather sitting in your living room for three days.
The time is not going to announce itself. What comes instead is more weeks that look like the last ones, more years that passed without you quite noticing, more conversations that start with we should really do that someday.