A tandem skydive

There is a long, banal wait first: paperwork, a harness fitting, a briefing you will not fully remember, and time to think that you would rather not have. Then the aircraft, small and loud, spirals up for fifteen minutes to altitude while the fields below shrink to a patchwork of green and the horizon begins, faintly, to curve. Strapped tight to an instructor you have known for half an hour, you shuffle toward the open door. This is the worst moment. Nothing in the body agrees with what is about to happen. Then you are out, and the fear you expected does not arrive in the shape you expected. Freefall at around two hundred kilometres an hour is not falling in any familiar sense; there is no floor rushing up, no stomach-drop of a lift, but a solid wall of wind, a roar, and a strange, buffeting stability as the air holds you flat against it. For perhaps fifty seconds the world is enormous and you are entirely inside the present tense, unable to hold a single thought that is not this. The canopy opens with a firm tug and the roar stops dead. Now it is silent, and slow, and you hang in the harness while the instructor spirals gently down and the landscape resolves back into roads, cars and the drop zone's orange windsock. Five or six minutes of stillness after the loudest minute of your year, the adrenaline draining into something close to elation. It needs no skill and takes an afternoon, which is exactly why it earns its place: the ratio of transformation to effort is unmatched anywhere on the list. Choose a centre affiliated with the national parachuting body, go on a clear and calm day, and eat something light beforehand rather than nothing at all. Almost everyone lands changed by a small degree, and grinning in a way that takes a while to wear off.