My Kind of Isolation

By Luis Socorro | September 1, 2020

The lockdown has been especially hard for me.  A motion designer, I was easily able to transition to working from home and sharing work via the cloud. But part of me was always in the clouds–the real ones. Next to my family, I live for paragliding–the incredible exhilaration of taking flight with my own “wings,” something that humans have dreamed about for centuries.

As with other sports and arts, after acquiring enough experience, the paraglider pilot becomes one with the environment, staying present by instinct like the birds do. This blurring of subject and object keeps me in the safe zone while I keep on learning, thus avoiding the mistake that Icarus made.

So it was an incredible experience when I took to the skies off Mont Yamaska near Montreal after being grounded for so long by the winter (one stops flying after the first heavy snowfall–that makes hiking up the mountain a little more technical, or when the thermometer gets under 5°F—that’s frostbite cold). And then, of course, there were COVID 19 restrictions about travel and group gatherings.

As soon as my feet lift the ground, I find that the sense of freedom is impossible to put into words, especially after being forced to be a ground dweller for so long. So I made a video instead. In this film you can occasionally see the shadow of another paraglider in my group 50-100 meters away–the ultimate in social distancing!

 

 

When we land, we sit around a table to sip some local ale and share the  learning and fun of our recent flights. Where else could a Venezuelan (me), a Ukrainian, a German, and an Iranian pilot sit down after sharing a temporary reprieve from both the laws of gravity and the gravity of the pandemic?

Copyright © 2020 Luis Socorro
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1 Comments

  1. Dani Socorro on September 1, 2020 at 1:40 pm

    I just fly through every single word Luis; thanks for sharing your views as well as your social distance mode that by far is better than ours 🙂

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