i may not be troy tulowitzki material [how about those blue jays?!], but i was a pretty darn good short stop if i do say so myself.

my ability to keep my eye on the ball was matchless, my arm, a canon, and honestly, the only time i made a defensive error was when i got ahead of myself and focused on throwing the ball to first before i even thought about getting the ball in my glove in the first place.

isn't that how we face life sometimes? by paying too much attention to the next step, the next task, the next day [whatever], instead of focussing on what is actually happening in our lives right at this very moment?

i thought about this a lot during my most recent skydiving [thankfully, not sky-die-ving] experience.

you see, while many focus on the actual jumping part, there's actually a lot more to the whole experience than that one significant step.

first, you have the road trip with new friends, and old, and experiencing all of the emotions that each of you are feeling bottled up in one car. some are excited, some, anxious, and some are feeling both, but regardless, you're in it together.

and you're in it together when a ghetto station wagon hits you and rips your bumper off less than a block away from the runway you set out to conquer, and sets you back an hour. [true story].

and then there's the prep stage; the 'you may die' DVD they make you watch, the pages and pages of paperwork you sign to acknowledge that you may not make it, meeting your instructor who convinces you you will, getting suited up, and doing mock jumps in makeshift airplane cabins.

following that comes the ride up - 20 minutes of bliss - followed by the most anticipated part of all: the jump. from there, you fall, and glide, and if you're lucky, land safely, excited that you didn't give people a reason to watch the video, but sad that you're no longer in the air.

the thing is, it would have been easy for any one of us to let the content of the video, or the anxious feelings we were feeling because of it, prevent us from embracing this experience as a whole, and truthfully, some did [and some do}, but what good is that? what good would the plane ride have been had i had been focussing on my way down the whole time? and what good is today if all we're doing is focussing on tomorrow?