course of who I am as a human being. It was very overwhelming,
because I realized I can decide not to do this right now and I probably
won’t die today. I’ll probably live today. But in about 20 years from
now, maybe 30, maybe 40, whatever the number is, Iwilldie. And I’ll
look back at this moment as the moment that changed my life,
where I finally allowed fear to dictate what I was going to do.”
And all of a sudden, I think “You know what? Today’s as
good a day to die as any other. I’m going. And all of a sudden
I became very calm, and I got on that helicopter and I jumped.
And I started flying toward the cliff. And at first, I think to myself,
‘Maybe I’ll just fly over it...I’m just going to fly over it. I’m not
doing this.’ And then I think, ‘You didn’t come here to fly over it.
Just go for it.’”
And he did.
“It was one of the most powerful experiences of my entire
life. And you can hear it in my voice. You’re just hearing me scream,
‘I made it. I’m alive. I’m alive.’
“Ten minutes before, this was done. It was never gonna
happen. This was impossible. No way was this going down. And it
was just amazing. It was one of those things where the experience
was horrible, horrible, horrible. It’s impossible to describe it. When
you finally do step through fear and you find out what’s on the
other side of it.
“The fear at that moment, the moment of sitting in the
helicopter contemplating the fact that I’d just recovered from an
accident that should have killed me, and the fact that I survived it
and then had to learn to walk again and went through multiple
surgeries and the pain and the suffering.
“And I think the only reason I continued was because I knew
I was going to die one day. That’s really a big part of what’s allowed
me to do the things that I do. My little sister had a best friend who
got her driver’s license, had it for one week, was driving herself to
school, got hit by a person who fell asleep behind the wheel, and
killed her instantly. She’d never done a dangerous thing in her life.
Boom, taken out doing something we do every single day without
thinking about it. Another friend, brain aneurysm, walks into
a room, dropped dead. No one even knew it. Healthy, in their 30s,
didn’t drink, didn’t do drugs, nothing. Boom, turned off like
a switch.”
Jeb, like a lot of high sensation-seekers, doesn’t have a death
wish at all. What he has is an extreme passion for life and he wants87 / Sports and Adventure in High Sensation-SeekingDownloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Access paid by the UCSF Library, on 11 Nov 2019 at 14:19:03, subject to the Cambridge