July is the month we say goodbye to writers who are retiring or moving on to new adventures, and this is Lauren’s last post. She has been writing with us since August 2020.

This is the story of when I ran off the side of a mountain. 

In the fall of 2019 I studied abroad in Grenoble, France, which is surrounded by three mountain ranges—the Chartreuse, the Belledonne, and the Vercors. Besides skiing, a popular sport is paragliding, and several students, including me, took advantage of the opportunity to try it after our professor gave us the contact information for a local guide. 

There was a certain spot a short bus ride from town where paragliders typically took off from, as it provided the proper altitude and updrafts. Me and two other girls met up with the guide and his wife, who drove us all up to the top of the mountain. There, a wide, flat, grassy area sloped down until it abruptly cut off.

After laying out the canopy and putting on the harness, a paraglider would run towards the edge of the mountain at full speed, allowing air to fill the canopy and lift them up in the air once the paraglider ran out of mountain, and from there they could pull on the handles that connected to the canopy to control their direction. Since we were flying tandem, we would be harnessed in front of the guide and he would control the handles. All we had to do, he said, was keep running, even after we lifted into the air. 

The two girls I was with went first, both managing to become airborne. They glided around in circles for a bit before landing on the plain at the foot of the mountain. It was later in the day when my turn came, and we had to wait in the ready position for a while until the winds picked up again. 

Once they did, the guide told me to start running. It felt like I was running in place for a while, as the canopy took a moment to lift into the air. As we approached the edge the guide started yelling something in my ear. Between the wind and it being in French, I wasn’t perfectly confident in what it was, but I thought it was “Run.”

But then I second-guessed myself. What if he was actually yelling to stop, and by continuing to run I would drag us both over the edge of the cliff? The ground started to curve away under my feet and I pulled my feet up. 

Except my hesitation caused the exact outcome I’d feared. 

By me stopping running, we had enough momentum for the canopy to drag us forward but not enough for us to become airborne, and we indeed fell over the side of the mountain onto an incline covered in brambles. 

It took a while to climb up the steep incline and longer to untangle the strings of the canopy, but other than numerous scratches from the thorns, the only true injuries were to my ego, and the guide was more than willing to try again with me. I didn’t have any problems continuing to run the second time.

The ride turned out to be more peaceful than thrilling. I just had to sit back and enjoy the view. And yet my main memory of the whole experience is of shame and embarrassment that I wasn’t able to run off the side of a mountain like everyone else was able to. 

It’s been three years, but I still think back to that moment when I second-guessed myself and see in it a metaphor for how I find it hard to throw myself into things. My hope for my life is that I’ll always live wholeheartedly, and yet I often find myself holding myself back due to anxiety or fear of failure or rejection. I have things I want to pursue, but I find it hard to run towards them on my own two feet. 

And yet my experience paragliding wasn’t a complete failure. I still did it. I ran off the edge of a mountain, despite every signal from the caveman parts of my brain that what I was doing would lead to certain death. 

So maybe there’s hope for my hopes and dreams yet. 

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