Surviving a skydiving accident… and making the most of it (VIDEO)

It's a skydiving instructor's worst nightmare: you jump out of the plane. Your student follows. You're both free-falling at near-terminal velocity. The student's positioning isn't right. He starts falling too quickly. Zip…. He's almost out of sight. You need to catch up.

You manage to do so. Then things go terribly wrong.

Suddenly, you're both falling through the sky, completely out of control…

The day this happened to Chris Colwell, in 2003. He was wearing a helmet camera. The whole harrowing incident is captured on the brief video below. Go ahead, watch it. We're not going to tell you what happens, other than to say there's no gore. Colwell is incredibly inspiring.

Oh, and obviously, he survived.

Here's the aftermath: the moment Colwell's head hit his student's body, he was paralyzed from the chest down. That's why he couldn't deploy his chute, or his student's. 

Paralysis? A mere inconvenience, it seems. He has turned his new life into an online sensation — as depicted in the second video, below – one of more than 500. He's an inspiration for other quadriplegics, and to the rest of us as well. He composes great music. And he'll be speaking at TEDx Dubai in October 2011.

His message: "Live life NOW."

Colwell made lemonade. Compare his travails to your own. As our colleague Andy Meldrum says, "Sunshine comes from within."

Hat tip to France24, from whom we learned of this story.