Before you decide you're going to jump, you stand there, looking down. You realize that at any point you can turn around and that you don't have to do it. No one is forcing you—you can turn around at any moment and climb back down to the safety of solid ground. Thousands of thoughts and images flash through the synapses of your mind as you think about what you are going to do. This of course all happens in nanoseconds.
And in what seems as just as brief a time, you actually decide that you're going to jump. Even if you've stood at the precipice for hours, days, weeks, months. You realize the moment you do it right before your brain even has a chance to fire off the signals to neurons that require your body to make the first move.
Then, you jump.
And what happens next? You're in free fall. Even if you're heading toward a safe landing, water perhaps—you're at the mercy of an element that you don't have a lot of control in. All you can do is go with it until your body makes contact. That's what happens after the jump. Sometimes you just have to go with it.
