geezer7127

Parachutes de France has taken out a full page ad in the August issue of "Skydiving" magazine, page 9. All its says is "PARACHUTES de FRANCE DOES NOT SELL ITS PRODUCTS IN THE UNITED STATES" with a picture of someone swooping a pond somewhere with what looks like a "SPRINGO" canopy. What is the point of the ad? I may be wrong, but I don't think many of us in the US are going to hop on a plane to Paris just to buy one of their canopies because they won't sell us one over here. What am I missing here?

Hey Iceman, you've gotten a lot of good advise so far. I hope this will help too. A pretty good life rule is to "turn negatives into positives." Whatever you view as negative, you always have the opportunity to change the context or the circumstance so that you end up thinking about it and viewing it differently, hopefully more positively. It's always your choice. In your situation, there may be many aspects of the sport in which you are not yet expert. Set a new goal to become expert in any one of them. Set a new direction for your skydiving career and pursue it with renewed enthusiasm and spirit. If there is a skydiving discipline that you feel is not for you, give it a go. You may be surprised. Most importantly, whatever action you take must shed that which is causing you to burn out, or at least enable you to put it in perspective such that it no longer affects you negatively. As for DZ politics and stuff, don't get involved if you don't want to. Let it go. Move on. Chart a new and exciting course that steers clear of butt-heads or at least puts you in the driver's seat to pick the butt-heads with whom you will interact. I wish I hadn't left the sport for 16 years while my kids were growing up. And I'm glad I did too. But no sport or activity ever really took the place of skydiving. My goal now is to stay with the sport for the long haul, learning new things, especially those things that I think I can't learn or don't want to learn (turning negatives into positives.) Take care.