The other day I was feeling a bit mopey. Adult decisions and changes can be a bit overwhelming! Now take that and add some pregnancy hormones, and some days my brain just seems to simultaneously stall and go into overdrive at the same time. So, I did what I always do when my brain is just done and I can’t sleep: I turned on an episode of Star Trek… and the episode that happened to be my next one couldn’t have been more timely.
Its a Q episode so of course it was going to be good. The episode is “Tapestry.”
Let me tell you about it… (non Star Trek fans, I promise this is good… just read it)
It starts off with Captain Picard being seriously wounded and they can’t get his artificial heart to work. While Dr. Crusher and the team work on him, of course, in comes Q. How could he resist?! Q talks to Picard in this heaven-like place, telling Picard he’s dead. To keep it short, Q basically gives Picard the opportunity to go back to a time he regrets: his young adult life. Picard says that he was risky and arrogant as a young person and it’s what cost him his heart to begin with. In a silly fight, he got stabbed in the heart and if he wouldn’t have been so arrogant and risky he wouldn’t be in the position he is now, dying from an issue with his heart. Q gives him the chance to go back and change what happened. He loses his friends but keeps out of the situation that got him the wound. When he returns to the future, however, he is no longer a captain. He is merely a junior officer on the engineering team. He is a safe, boring analyst with a career that is going no where. He approaches Riker and Counselor Troy about his position and tries to understand how he got to this point.
They explain that he’s a good officer and he says to them, “What would you say if I told that I believe I was capable of very much more.”
They sputter around about his good record and he says again, “I believe that I can do more.”
Finally Troy responds with a real answer. “Hasn’t that been the problem all along. Throughout your career you’ve had lofty goals but have never been willing to do what is necessary to attain them.”
Riker says, “If you want to get ahead you have to take chances. Stand out in the crowd. Get noticed.”
He realizes that the riskiness and arrogance of his youth, mistakes and all, are what made him who he was. He needed to learn those lessons or he would have never become the great man that he did.
He calls out for Q and exclaims “I can’t live out my days as that person.That man is bereft of passion and imagination! That is not who I am!”
Q responds, “Au contraire. He’s the person you wanted to be: one who was less arrogant and undisciplined in his youth, one who was less like me… The Jean-Luc Picard you wanted to be, the one who did not fight the Nausicaan, had quite a different career from the one you remember. That Picard never had a brush with death, never came face to face with his own mortality, never realized how fragile life is or how important each moment must be. So his life never came into focus. He drifted through much of his career, with no plan or agenda, going from one assignment to the next, never seizing the opportunities that presented themselves. He never led the away team on Milika III to save the Ambassador; or take charge of the Stargazer’s bridge when its captain was killed. And no one ever offered him a command. He learned to play it safe – and he never, ever, got noticed by anyone.”
BOOM!!!!!
Of course I’m pregnant but I totally started to cry. Our mistakes and how we handle them are what makes us who we are. It’s easy to get caught up in how we could have done things differently. We can say “but this isn’t how it was supposed to be” but what you don’t know is WHAT “COULD HAVE BEEN” MAY HAVE BEEN MUCH MUCH WORSE THAN YOU CAN EVEN THINK.
Sometimes we need to be reminded of that in the thick of things. Sometimes you just need a little encouragement and a soft place to land when things get scrambled.
I’d rather be a risk-taker any day than someone who sits back and lets life just happen to them. I’ll dream up my crazy-ass plans and I will make it happen and it when it doesn’t go as planned, I won’t wallow in my misery…. for long at least 🙂 I don’t know what future Meg looks like yet but I do know that future Meg will be better.
Don’t take learning moments for granted. It’s the rain we need to grow.
PS- how can people NOT like Star Trek!? You have no idea what you’re missing.
Leave a Reply