The day I stopped a suicide jumper

Published in

bemighty

6 min readSep 15, 2019

or the flat tire that saved a young mans life

Photo: https://www.flickr.com/photos/paulwasneski/

DO NOT confuse acceptance with giving up — it does not mean you throw up your arms and don’t make an effort to change your situation. Radical Acceptance means letting go of all of the urges to control your outcomes when you Can Not Control them!

The greatest lesson I have learned is the idea of what I call “Radical Acceptance”. The idea that despite your best efforts to shape your destiny in the path and direction you have planned that the universe is guiding you in another direction.

This has been a lesson I’ve been learning for several years now and for an entrepreneur who tries to maintain control over the outcome of my life there has been SO MUCH that I can’t control, divorce/being a single parent to 2 kids, sinking debt and misfortune, it’s been one of the hardest lessons to learn to accept.

The storm you face is your teacher. The experience you gain is your lesson. The life you make from it all is your blessing. ― Kemi Sogunle

Sometimes that series of annoying coincidences might be the delay you need to think differently about a problem. I try to think of it as the universe gently redirecting me (and sometimes not so gently) pushing me in a direction that will eventually lead to something much better. Perhaps the best way to describe it is by an illustration of something that happened to me on January 30th 2016 I was riding my bike on my way to work.

I used to ride my bike to work nearly everyday, but on that day my front tire went flat in seconds at the foot of the Manhattan Bridge grinding me to a halt. This was not part of my plan, now what!? I really needed to get to work like any day but my business had been in decline for sometime so I felt an urgency to work even harder these days.

I could have been pissed, I could have freaked out, I could have yelled and screamed at my tire, at NYC’s unkept streets, at the universe. But what could I really do? I let go.

I decided to walk the bike to work but had to switch sides of the bridge to take the pedestrian side which I never take but it was a crisp bright morning and I was going to make the best of it.

As I approached the first giant pillar of the bridge a Chinese lady was walking towards me in the opposite direction pointing backward at something and speaking in Mandarin and like most odd encounters in NYC I ignored her until I went a few steps further.

There was a man about to jump off the bridge. He was standing on the outside of the fenced walkway wearing a hoodie. A runner had stopped and was pivoting cautiously towards the man and was looking to me as I approached that’s when my instincts kicked in and I ran up within a few yards of the man.

“Hey, I dunno what’s going on for you right now but let me tell you that things will get better.” What came pouring out of me was like a stream of consciousness pep speech. “This is not the way to solve your problems man. I’ve been there, trust me, I’ve had all kinds of shit happen in my life and I’m so thankful now that I held on.”

I was desperately trying to connect with him and started pouring out some of the worst chapters of my life; my Dad was a bank robber and drug addict, how I was separated from my parents for my childhood, how I felt like shit so many times — how I’ve felt like him, but this will not solve it. I told him “I’m much older now I have a family and my life is great — you just have to hang in there — things change, trust me!”

He only shook his head in a subtle dismissive denial. My stream of consciousness ramblings didn’t stop there. I watched as he leaned forward over the void with one foot dangling down like he was testing the water in a pool with only a few fingers gripping the fence.

It occurred to me that this might be the day I witness a man die — I wasn’t going to let today be that day.

I got even closer to him. I don’t remember anything else of what I was saying. It was a blur of emotion as I was trying to coax him to come down. He leaned back onto the fence again, gradually looking back towards me for an instant, then back out over the void.

The runner and I tried to grip parts of his clothes through the fence as we were right behind him now. He turned and mumbled something which I thought could be his final words when he shifted his weight and turned fully around to face us “I’m getting down” he said.

He was a handsome young black man, probably in his twenties, and he didn’t speak much after he got down. I asked him if he wanted to get a coffee. We walked down to a diner on Canal Street in silence and then upon arriving sat more or less quietly together, me joking that he and I had the same barber with our matching haircuts. Within a few minutes of our enjoying the coffee some police officers encircled the diner and came in and took him away.

“Radical Acceptance” is accepting my flat tire for the moment not knowing how it will actually impact my life, but if it had not been for a random flat tire that day this young man may have taken his life.

Sometimes the things that we think are slowing us down are really guiding us towards our true path and we have to let go and take the turn in the road that life is giving you.

You should still give something 100% of your effort and drive to go in the direction of your intentions but after you do there comes a point when you have to give in. When you have to listen to forces that are gently putting up speed bumps in your path without getting annoyed. When do you accept that your path is going another direction? This is a tough one that I will go into more detail on later in another post.

Radical Acceptance is leaving yourself open to the idea that when failure, setbacks, misfortunes and flat tires occur they are all part of the process.

You have to accept that you are being guided to something more meaningful that you need to discover, learn, accept or teach. There are other plans in store for you that are not yet revealed.

A couple years later after that incident I was crossing that bridge having reached a very dark place in my own life. I was a million dollars in debt, my business in crisis and having let go of all of my staff I was struggling to save my business as a single Dad strained for time. Every day I would look down at the cold frigid waters of the East River below me and I could imagine how such darkness could bring a person to consider ending it all to escape the incessant pressures of uncertainty.

But had it not been for a flat tire that in turn blessed me with an experience that made me appreciate the value of never giving up and forced me to renew my own vows in the faith and conviction that despite whatever outcome life has in store for you that it is so worth living is the best example of what I mean by “Radical Acceptance”.

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The day I stopped a suicide jumper

or the flat tire that saved a young mans life

Written by Terrence Kelleman