Creativity and Jumping
with Mark Higgins
image by Field
words by KaldorMark Higgins is a barrister. Like any barrister, he thrives on that feeling of being in the middle of cross-examination or at the end of a closing address and knowing he’s won the case.
He gets a similar feeling when he performs. As he edges up to the doorway, he remembers his preparation and runs over his routine. He squints at that big spotlight and his nervous energy builds. Then he jumps – and, as soon as he’s performing, everything changes:
It completely clears your head and that's what I love about it. Absolutely clears my head. All the noise of the week, between your ears, disappears.
Higgins is a skydiver; his performance happens in freefall, thousands of metres above the ground.
Higgins starts his interview with by getting the facts out of the way. (What else would you expect from a common law barrister?) His canopy has nine cells and covers an area of 135 square feet. He recently downsized from 170 square feet. Smaller means more elliptical, easier to manoeuvre and a faster drop. His wing loading, the ratio of body weight to canopy size, is 1.7. “Anything over 2 is aggressive.”
(At the risk of introducing colour into this objective account of the facts, the open parachute looked a bit like a barrister’s velvet bag draped over Higgins’ shoulder. He wasn’t sure about the comparison. He is much more affectionate about his canopy than those “anachronistic” bags: “they are terrible for your back, poor for lever-arch folders and don't protect your computer”.)
It was always a leap to invite a skydiving barrister to take part in this project – alongside writers, painters and comedians. An ungraceful fall might have been a forced conversation about creativity with a highly regimented, self-interested thrill seeker.
Instead, the descent into the creativity of jumping from planes led to a firm landing for Laws of Creativity. To start with, skydiving for Higgins is not about chasing thrills. “The rush of speed has worn off. I've got more than a thousand jumps. The rush now is about the performance anxiety.”
And just like other performers, Higgins describes the state of “flow” that comes from his creative act – a state that he believes “reconnects” us with the “primal skills” that have been “dulled” by the constraints and cues of living in society. In this sense at least, Higgins might consider a day in Sydney’s CBD to be much more regimented than any of his jumps.
A preference for performance over speed explains why Higgins participates in “formation” events – Four-Way and Big-Way – where groups of skydivers work together to design and achieve patterns in the air. He was recently part of a record event where 130 people formed an icicle. In 2015, he jumped with a group to make a helix DNA structure. Higgins explains that the average jump is about 60 seconds, falling about 1000 feet (300 metres) every five seconds. That means the group has about 40 seconds to build the formation and then 20 seconds to track away from each other for a safe landing.
“I think one of the reasons barristers wear robes and wigs is it gives them a persona they can hide behind. They become something in the eyes of other people, rather than being judged on who they actually are.”
Higgins reflects that he’s always been drawn to team pursuits, but has chosen such a solitary career. “Being a barrister is anything but being a team person.” In Higgins’ view, independence does not necessarily foster individuality:
I think one of the reasons barristers wear robes and wigs is it gives them a persona they can hide behind. They become something in the eyes of other people, rather than being judged on who they actually are.
Skydiving offers Higgins a minute of creativity and individuality that helps him reconnect with who he actually is.
But there is common ground between Higgins the lawyer and Higgins the jumper. Just as a barrister is a courtroom specialist, skydiving is a highly specialised form of creative expression. This commonality has its benefits for Higgins:
Skydiving has improved my ability to be a lawyer. It teaches me to focus. It teaches me to block out distractions. It teaches me the importance of preparation and it fine-tunes my drive for perfection.
We could take a guess at where Higgins falls in that perpetual debate about the virtues and vices of generalism and specialism. That debate will rage on – but, hopefully for the rest of us, it’s still possible to embrace a creative spirit in life without plunging out of a plane.
Mark Higgins is a Barrister at Black Chambers in Sydney. He was admitted as a solicitor in 1988 and worked in a number of roles at Legal Aid, before being called to the NSW bar in 2000. His main areas of practice are criminal, coronial and administrative law.