Thursday, August 18, 2011

The Parachute


Charles Plumb was a U.S. navy jet pilot in Vietnam.  After seventy-five combat missions his plane was destroyed by a surface-to-air missile.  Plumb ejected and parachuted into enemy territory.  He was captured and spent six years in a communist Vietnamese prison.  He survived the ordeal and now lectures on lessons learned from that experience.

One day, when Plumb and his wife were sitting in a restaurant, a man at another table came up and said, “You’re Plumb!  You flew jet fighters in Vietnam from the aircraft carrier Kitty Hawk.  You were shot down!”

“How in the world did you know that?” asked Plumb.

“I packed your parachute,” the man replied.  Plumb gasped in surprise and gratitude.  

The man pumped his hand and said, “I guess it worked!”  Plumb assured him, “It sure did.  If your chute hadn’t worked, I wouldn’t be here today.”   

Plumb couldn’t sleep that night, thinking about that man.  Plumb says, “I kept wondering what he might have looked like in a Navy uniform: a white hat, and bell-bottom trousers.  I wonder how many times I might have seen him and not even said, ‘Good morning, how are you?’  After all, I was a fighter pilot and he was just a sailor.”

Plumb thought of the many hours this sailor had spent at a wooden table in the bowels of the ship, carefully weaving the shrouds and folding the silks of each chute, holding in his hands each time the fate of someone he didn’t know.

Plumb asks his audience, “Who’s packing your parachute?”  

Everyone has someone who provides a needed ingredient to help them make it through another day.  

Sometimes in the daily challenges that life gives us, we miss what is really important.  We may fail to say hello, please, thank you.  We pass up opportunities to congratulate someone on something wonderful that has happened to them.  We miss chances to give a compliment, or just do something nice for no reason.  

We are connected.  You do know that, right?  Whether I meet some of my readers face to face or not, we are connected nevertheless. 

I’m all about making connections and re-connections at this point in my life.  Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter are wonderful tools for helping us with this reconnecting experience. 

People who played major roles in my life and were forgotten a few years ago are now vivid in my memory again, simply because of the reconnect. 

Some of these individuals packed my chute and I had a hand in packing other’s chutes.  The cycle continues. 

To you, my friend, my family members, and my cherished inner circle of friends, thank you from the bottom of my heart for carefully packing my chute.  I have had a few bumps along the way, and so have you, but I’m floating relatively safely and securely, thanks to your careful hand in my life at the times I needed your hand the most.

We have had our chutes packed in dozens of ways.
-A skill taught that has stood the test of time
-A word spoken at the precise moment it is needed
-A life modeled before me of integrity and respect
-An act of kindness when I was down on my luck
-A job offer when I was down to my last dollar
-An encouraging word when all else I heard was put-downs and negative nonsense

I could add a dozen more examples. 

Think about your life.  Add your own experiences. 

Above all, reach out to someone who has packed your parachute.  Call them.  Extend to them the gift of kindness, thanks, appreciation and a re-connect. 

It’s yet another way of packing someone else’s chute.

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