Thats Incredible

My friend went to a Tony Robbins seminar and walked on hot coals. Me, being a skeptic, assumed there was some gimmick. My friend was convinced that it was the real deal. I was determined to prove it was all a hoax.

I signed up for the same seminar. It was two hours of motivational speaking and then we went outside for the fire walk. My friends had watched the fire being built and watched it burn until it was a bed of glowing coals. Standing five feet away, I could feel the heat. When it was my turn, I walked the length of the coal bed. No problem.

Still skeptical, I got in line for a second go. This time I slowed my pace. I did the old mountain climbers’ high altitude walk: one step, breath, next step, breath. At the end, again, no problem. The only burn I had was from a coal that had flipped up onto the top of my foot.

To this day, I still can’t understand it.

@good, great story

My first flight in an airplane wasn't so much life changing as incredible/astounding.

I'd guess I was 8 or 9YO when I climbed into the right hand seat with my dad in his first airplane. The bumpy ride on the taxiway, the wings kinda flexing/dipping with every crack in the asphalt had me wondering if it would fall apart on the ground...

The take off run, watching the ground fall away and getting pushed back in the seat thinking OMG!!! WTF is holding this thing up....?

I recovered from the initial terror in a few minutes and eventually my dad let me take the "wheel" and drive that bitch through the clouds and shit. It. Was. Indescribably euphoric

I couldn't reach the pedals. I could barely see over the instrument panel (so I learned to fly by instruments) but I noticed his hands were just an inch or 2 from the "steering wheel".

I was hooked; not on phonics, but flying. And airplanes.

His 2nd airplane had painted trim but was mostly bare aluminum. That thing shined like a mirror because he'd drop me off at the airport with polish, rags a ladder, open the hangar door and "let" me polish every inch of that thing.

Which allowed me the opportunity to meet many people from adjoining hangars and check out all kinds of airplanes and airplane accessories up close and personal like. Like, there was the guy who restored WW2 warbirds and the guy who was building his own home made airplane, and the guy with the Lear jet.

That's great it had such an impact on you.

The first serious theater I saw was when I was perhaps 9 we had a school trip to see Don Quixote at the Prince of Wales theater in Toronto.

Early in the performance during the matador dance scene, the lead actor broke his leg. No replacement was available and thus we spent all that time to watch the show for 15 minutes and see a guy go to a hospital.

In first grade, a local theatre troupe brought a production of Puss 'n Boots to my little Catholic school in the middle of San Francisco. It was the first time I'd seen actors on a stage, and it was magical. The lifechanging moment was after the play, though, when the actors sat on the edge of the stage and talked to us.

Real people did art. It was revelatory in a way I still can't fully explain. But there was before that play and after.

I'll start

I was once in a zoo and watching an enclosure of orangutans. A relatively small female (I think) somehow got her hands on a men's dress shirt. She was messing with it and examining it, and kept trying to stick her arms through the sleeves, then looking up and then back at the shirt.

I realized that she had noticed a man watching the enclosure was wearing a similar shirt. She was trying to figure out how to put it on like he did. Between the shirt being kind of inside out and twisted around and her arms being much too large to fit through the sleeves, she eventually became frustrated and gave up. But watching her come to the understanding of what it was she had in her hands and what it was for is something I'll never forget.

Not an age test, and not a reference to the 80s TV show.

Tell me something that you've witnessed or otherwise experienced that you thought was astounding, life changing, incredible, etc.