Deep Life Reflections: Friday Five
Issue 101 - The Brink
Welcome to Issue 101 of Deep Life Reflections, where each week I share my thoughts on what I’m reading, watching, and thinking about.
And a Happy Birthday to my sister, George 🎉
What happens in the moments before the point of no return? This week, we explore human beings at the edge—some by choice, others by crisis. Jumpers, a New Yorker article, explores the lives behind the Golden Gate Bridge’s tragic statistics. Free Solo follows a climber whose mastery of precision, obsession, and fear (or lack of it) takes him to the limit. Both are about the brink—where control meets consequence.
Join me as we explore this week’s Friday Five.
1. What I’m Reading
Jumpers. Article by Tad Friend. The New Yorker, 2003.
Ken Baldwin remembers the moment his hands left the railing. As he sped downward, he had a pristine moment of clarity. “I instantly realised that everything in my life that I’d thought was unfixable was totally fixable—except for having just jumped.”
Baldwin is one of the rare few who have survived a jump from the Golden Gate Bridge, the world’s most infamous suicide site. The drop is 220 feet. The body plummets for four seconds, reaching 75 mph before slamming into the water with the force of an explosion. Vertebrae snap. Ribs shatter inward, puncturing lungs and heart. Organs rupture. For most, death is immediate. For others, it comes more slowly, as they plunge, broken, into the depths, and drown.
Jumpers is one of those investigative pieces The New Yorker is famous for. Written in 2003, it’s richly informative, yet wholly human. Since its opening in 1937, about 2,000 people are estimated to have jumped to their deaths from the Golden Gate Bridge—an average of about two people per month. The article sheds light on these tragedies and explores the long-running debate over anti-suicide barriers.
The bridge itself is an architectural marvel, a gleaming Art Deco span that is iconic and ingenious. It’s a passage, a threshold—both in geography and in the minds of those who stand at its edge. At least twelve hundred people have been seen jumping or have been found in the water. The true number is likely far higher—many sneak onto the bridge after sundown, when the walkway is closed. They jump and are carried to sea, never discovered. Many leave notes behind, wrapped in plastic in their pockets. “Survival of the fittest. Adios—unfit,” wrote one seventy-year-old.
To jump, you must commit completely. Many survivors, including Baldwin and Kevin Hines, describe the same ritual: counting down to ten, freezing, starting over, until finally vaulting over the railing before fear could pull them back. But those who survive, who hit the water just right, feet first at an angle, often say the same thing: they wished, in midair, that they hadn’t.
Jumpers often idealise what will happen after they step off the bridge. Studies reveal a romanticised perception of suicide from the Golden Gate Bridge—its aesthetic beauty making it feel like a pure and fantastical gateway to something else, something better.
Dr. Richard Seiden’s 1978 study, Where Are They Now?, followed 515 people who had been stopped from jumping between 1937 and 1971. More than 90% were still alive decades later or had died of natural causes. Suicide, he concluded from his research, is a crisis-oriented decision—an acute impulse rather than a lifelong certainty. A person who can be talked through their worst hour might never return to the edge—Seiden put the high-risk period at ninety days.
Patrol officer Kevin Briggs has stood between hundreds of would-be jumpers and the void. He starts with a simple question: “How are you feeling today?” If they don’t have an answer, he asks, “What’s your plan for tomorrow?” If they don’t have a plan, they make one. “If it doesn’t work out, you can always come back here later.”
For some, that intervention is enough. The non-physical barrier catches between fifty and eighty people a year, and misses about thirty. Dr. Jerome Motto, a longtime Bay Area psychiatrist, has fought—and failed—twice to secure a suicide barrier. He recalls his most affected case: a patient who jumped in 1963. “The guy was in his thirties, lived alone, pretty bare apartment. He’d written a note. It said, ‘I’m going to walk to the bridge. If one person smiles at me on the way, I will not jump.’”
When Joseph Strauss built the Golden Gate Bridge, he believed it would demonstrate man’s control over nature. But as the article’s closing line reminds us, “No engineer has discovered a way to control the wildness within.”
Footnote
As of January 1, 2024, the Golden Gate Bridge now has a continuous physical suicide barrier spanning its entire 1.7-mile length. According to bridge authorities, suicides have dropped to 20% of their historical average.
Here is the link to the original New Yorker article from 2003.
2. What I’m Watching
Free Solo. Directed by Jimmy Chin and Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi.
Alex Honnold doesn’t have a death wish. That’s the mistake people make when they see him scaling massive rock faces without, the horror, a rope. They assume he’s reckless. The truth is the opposite. Every move is rehearsed, memorised, drilled. Each foot placement, each grip, every shift in balance is logged and repeated until the wall is imprinted in his mind. He doesn’t climb to risk his life. He climbs to master it.
Free Solo follows Honnold’s 2017 ascent of El Capitan, a 3,000-foot vertical monolith in Yosemite. No ropes. No protection. Just him. And us. I’ve seen this film several times and every time it is pure exhilaration and pure dread. The film won the Best Documentary Oscar, largely because it forces us into his world. We are on that exposed rock face with him, whether we like it or not, hanging in the sky.
For most climbers, El Cap is a lifetime challenge. For Honnold, it’s a problem to solve. Composed almost entirely of a pale, coarse-grained granite approximately one hundred million years old, Honnold spends years breaking it into sections, assigning difficulty ratings to each pitch, mapping a perfect route. Then he rehearses it over and over, roped in, until there is no uncertainty left. Control is everything.
But Honnold isn’t just meticulous. He is wired differently. Quite literally. His amygdala, the brain’s fear centre, doesn’t react like most people’s. Neuroscientists have studied it. His brain simply doesn’t register threats in the same way. So when he climbs into ropeless situations that would cause almost any other person to freeze in terror, he very likely feels no fear up there. None at all. But he rejects the idea that he’s fearless. Fear exists. He just manages it better than anyone else.
Honnold is fascinating because of his contradictions. Intensely laid back—his nickname is No Big Deal—yet obsessed. He needs to be in those wildly exposed, potentially fatal positions, just like his heroes, the ropeless daredevil climbers of the 80s and 90s—but with control and precision, not recklessness. Honnold is unshakable but also emotionally distant. His partner, Sanni McCandless, struggles with his detachment. The film doesn’t shy away from this tension. He is wholly committed to climbing but can’t explain why. He knows soloing could kill him. That doesn’t deter him. It just means he has to get it right.
The final magnificent 20 minutes of Free Solo are among the most electrifying ever filmed. Before dawn, Honnold sets off. Filmmaker Jimmy Chin, a world-class climber himself, watches in hushed awe, “He’s off and he’s moving fast.” Honnold is locked in. Flow state.
There are moments where the margin for error disappears completely. The Boulder Problem, the most technical section of the climb, is a sequence requiring a karate kick to a tiny ledge and a pinky-finger grip on a razor-thin hold. It’s the key moment. A collective intake of breath. A mistake here isn’t a fall. It’s death. Honnold executes it exactly as he planned. It looks effortless. It is anything but.
Watching all this, you realise something: he’s free. He reaches the summit, stands, and smiles. He’s happy, but there’s no wild celebration, no excess emotion. He did what he came to do. No Big Deal.
But it is a big deal.
As one critic memorably put it, “One incredible climb for an athlete, one quantum leap for mankind.”
3. What I’m Contemplating
Both works this week explore the brink—one in tragedy, the other in the pursuit of precision. Jumpers and Free Solo both deal with decision-making under extreme conditions. There is a razor-thin line between control and surrender, between the terror of falling and the mastery of flow.
I’ve stood at the Golden Gate Bridge (twice) and at El Capitan in Yosemite National Park. Both are awe-inspiring—one built by man, the other by nature. The idea of falling from either, willingly or otherwise, is horrifying. Reading in Jumpers that nearly all survivors report instant regret mid-fall lingers in my mind. In that split second, I can’t imagine the horror of realising that what felt unbearable only moments before is now desperately worth saving—and being helpless to change it.
Much of life is lived on the symbolic cliff edge—just beyond the railing. Suicide barriers on the Golden Gate are an acknowledgment of this reality: that we don’t always understand each other, that crisis decisions often don’t need a permanent solution, just an interruption.
Not stopping. Just interrupting.
I think about the man in Jumpers whose note read, “If one person smiles at me, I will not jump.” That’s not a plea for a deep conversation, but a need to be seen, to be acknowledged—to have the moment interrupted.
Alex Honnold, by contrast, doesn’t seek interruption. He builds total self-reliance. He rehearses the edge until it is no longer a question. He has removed doubt, fear, impulse. He is the opposite of the jumper—not because he isn’t afraid, but because he controls the moment rather than the moment controlling him. But he is also on the brink by the very nature of what he does. One misstep is all that separates him from this world and the next.
Most of us aren’t free soloists. Most of us aren’t standing on the Golden Gate Bridge. But we all experience high-stakes moments in life—moments where our world shrinks and the decision feels vitally important. Maybe we can’t master those moments like Honnold. But maybe they don’t need to be mastered. Perhaps they just need to be interrupted. By someone we trust, someone we can rely on. Or even a stranger. Another voice, another perspective.
Today, there are special telephones on the Golden Gate Bridge that link directly to suicide crisis hotlines—a promise of a voice placed between impulse and consequence. Sometimes, that might be enough.
Not solve, not rescue. Just interrupt.
4. A Quote to note
“In any given moment we have two options: to step forward into growth or to step back into safety.”
- Abraham Maslow
5. A Question for you
Where in your life is it time to step forward, and where might stepping back be the right choice?
Both choices have value, depending on the moment.
Thanks for reading and being part of the Deep Life Journey community. If you have any reflections on this issue, please leave a comment. Have a great weekend.
James
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