By chance, I ran into a former champion in skydiving—a sport I used to follow with great passion—and asked him how athletes train for this dangerous sport. and he said, "At first, we train them to jump from a height of no more than 20 meters, then we gradually increase the height. They jump from a 30-meter-high tower, followed by jumping from an airplane flying over water at an altitude of 150 meters, and this marks the start of actual training in using and deploying the parachute. After that, the training sessions continue and the heights increase, sometimes reaching several kilometers in the air.

What is surprising is that one of the rules of this dangerous sport—which can cost a person their life—is that no teammate is allowed to pack or take care of another teammate’s parachute in any way whatsoever, Every member of the skydiving team is fully responsible for the care and maintenance of their own parachute before and after the jump; after each jump, they repack it into its own bag, which they carry on their back while gliding through the air, and the only one responsible for its safety is the skydiver himself, because if it fails to open, the inevitable outcome is death—God forbid.

The same is true in our daily lives: there are things we cannot entrust to anyone else to take care of; we alone must rely on ourselves to nurture them and provide them with care and attention. For example, our minds and bodies are to us like the parachute the skydiver uses during descent. In our early years, our knowledge is limited and our experience shallow, but our bodies are strong, At that time, all that is required of us is to develop our minds through reading and learning, and to preserve our health and energy from depletion, because in our old age we will need them more than in our youth, and we may not find them then.

The equation works in reverse: as we age, our experience grows and our store of knowledge increases, while health declines and strength wanes—strength that, if we do not conserve it, will fail us in our later years, as if it were deliberately holding us accountable in our time of frailty and weakness. We may need it at a certain moment, only to be surprised that the safety net does not work.

International Arbitrator for Commercial Arbitration Cases

Sharjah Chamber of Commerce and Industry—United Arab Emirates