Where None Have Gone Before
I don’t know what first drew me to it in high school and made it such a fixture of my Thursday nights back then. Hadn’t I got my fill of Sci-Fi courtesy of 1950s intergalactic gems like The Thing From Another World, Invaders From Mars and, the most timeless of them all, The Day the Earth Stood Still? And hadn’t I slogged through the pages of H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds, quite an accomplishment for someone who once only read books with pictures? Maybe it was William Shatner’s distinctive voice, summoning would-be mariners like me to join him and his crew in exploring “strange new worlds,” seeking out “new life and new civilizations,” and “boldly going where no man has gone before?” Or was it Alexander Courage’s enticing theme song played behind images of a strange looking starship swishing through the galaxies on its five-year voyage into deep space.
At any rate, I was quickly hooked on Star Trek, an interest that sustained me for two seasons before I came back to earth. So, when the original crew was put into dry dock two years shy of its intended mission, I was more saddened than surprised. Yet the concept, along with several generations of extra-terrestrial actors living new adventures in a far-off tomorrow, has continued to stoke the imaginations of trekkies right up into the present, some 57 years after its first airing on NBC. And consider some of the words that this singular show has added to our conversation: warp speed, phasers, tele-transportion of people and objects, and the irresistible “beam me up, Scotty.” Who would have ever thought that this intersteller knockoff of Wagon Train would have spawned twelve TV sequels and fourteen motion picture adaptations—so far? And who could have predicted that its most celebrated captain, the original Kirk, would outlive most of his crew and actually go where none of them could follow, if even for just ten, life-transforming minutes in an Elon Musk capsule?
Space travel remains a preoccupation for many people, the moon and Mars once again spurring our exploratory energies. While I never yearned to become an astronaut and have long stopped following the adventures of the Enterprise on any sized screen, my fascination with time, both in personal and cosmic reference, has never left me. The problem, however, is not knowing what it really is? Is time just the way we mark the movement of our planet around our home star, each rotation and revolution giving us artificial measurements to segment our existence into days, years, and lifetimes? Can time ever be stopped, or accelerated? There are moments when it does feel like time is crawling, while it sometimes whisks by at a pace that leaves us breathless. Can time be reversed by toggling some cosmic replay switch, or fast-forwarded to give us a preview of coming attractions or devastations? And if one could move ahead or behind in time, altering what was or might be, wouldn’t that create all kinds of problems for those stuck in the present? Jack Finney and Stephen King, among many other writers, pondered these head-scratchers, and a host of memorable movie characters, like Marty McFly, Bill and Ted, and that persistent terminating cyborg have turned the “what if’” of our wonderment into the almost-certainty of “when.”
Perhaps no occasion that gets me thinking about time more than when we annually reset our calendars to bid adieu to one year and greet the onset of another. With 2023 just a few days old and still sounding a bit strange to the ear, it remains to be seen what will happen and how we will regard what transpires in the next 365 days. Since time and tide wait for none of us, it is already proceeding at its accustomed pace. Just like Kirk, Spock, Scotty, Bones, Uhura, Sulu and Chekov, we are about to go where none of us—no human beings in fact-—have ever gone before. What will it look like? What will it present to us that brings a smile to our faces or drops us to our knees? How we survive in 2023 will have much to do with how we choose to look at time itself. Perhaps some rudimentary geometry may help.
Those with a historical bent seem to favor a linear view of how time operates. Each new moment a step into the unknown. From the vantage point of hindsight, through which all history is ultimately interpreted, this new year may someday be regarded as a time of progress, stagnation, or regression. Or, seen through a more naturalistic or even primal lens, 2023 will appear to proceed along the arc of a great circle with its predictable seasons, events, and repetitive human activities. What will be always replays what once was, only the names and particulars change from season to season, often suggesting a déjà vu reality in which we are cycling. Perhaps time swings back and forth like a cosmic pendulum, taking us from extreme to extreme and through all points in between. And as assuredly as we recall ancestral ages described as golden or darkened by sickness and ignorance, we could expect them to reappear in new variations of the several themes that seem to course through nature and human temperament. So when our Congress finds itself gridlocked in electing a Speaker of the House, is that a return of the pendulum bob to the same place our legislators found themselves in 100 years ago to be exact?
Perhaps it is time, rather than space, that is our final and ultimate frontier. If so, finding a way to navigate through it may be more important than losing ourselves in philosophical or geometrical conceptions of what it is and how it works. And it is to this consideration that I am most inclined to turn on this fifth day of this new year. For me, a most timeless observation about how to best approach the living of these days is found in the poetry of the biblical book we call Ecclesiastes. Some self-proclaimed yet unnamed king of ancient Israel—known only as Qohelth in Hebrew—-has left us a book of observations and sayings that have given him a voice we hear in either realistic or cynical tones. Most familiar to us are the fourteen lines in which he describes the parameters within which life proceeds for all us living under the sun. I feel confident that, were he alive today, he would still offer it as a prediction of our possibilities for this fledgling year. So, what should we expect out of the next 360 days?
They will invariably be filled with…
birthing, planting, healing, building up, laughing, dancing, gathering stones, embracing, seeking, sewing, speaking, loving, and peace.
And, just as assuredly, they will not lack for…
dying, reaping, killing, breaking down, crying, mourning, discarding stones, pulling away from each other, losing, tearing, silence, hating, and war.
But for a few other realities of the human condition we might add—like exhilaration, prosperity, satisfaction, elation, generosity, and contentment—AND-—tragedy, suffering, envy, hurt feelings, stinginess and depression—I think he covered most of the possibilities that time holds for us in the next 360 days. Now it is not uncommon for us to look at this portrayal of life’s circumstances and regard it as a struggle, perhaps even a game, in which we are driven to secure the most favorable of these oppositional terms, while avoiding the other. Doing so gives us the feeling we have overcome, endured, or even won, our litmus for what constitutes life at its best and most blessed. But what if, in taking the advice of the biblical sage, we move forward knowing that what lies ahead of us will be a time of birth and death, planting and reaping, healing and killing, and so forth. In other words, what if we decide to go into this new year—this time where no one has gone before—not trying to grab all that is favorable while avoiding what seems less so. What if, instead, we approached 2023 expecting it to contain a full menu of the and(s) that we must accept and even digest, rather than a contest between the or(s) that we must either embrace or resist?
I wish I could claim this as an insight that percolated up in my solitary ruminations about time. But this particular inspiration came to me while listening to a preacher last Sunday, his comments about Qohelet’s use of the conjunction and, rather than or, having implications for me far greater than stylistic or grammatical choice. It suddenly turned his verse from a pleasant litany of life’s extremes to be read at graduations, funerals and church services on New Year’s Sundays, and made it a summons to live each day fully aware of the extremities it may, can and probably will hold for each of us. For life is a smorgasbord containing the sweet and the bitter, the attractive and the ugly, the appetizing and the distasteful. While all of us must eat from this table, each of us chooses what we put on our plates, whether we walk away full or hungry, and the degree to which we are contented or dispirited by what was being served.
“To everything there is a season and a time…” So it will be in 2023, I would presume. And so it was projected into that 23rd century in which Kirk and company took us on many an adventure to far-away galaxies, traveling at warp speeds powered by impulse engines, transporter rooms ready to beam them up or down, phasers and flip-phones in hand. Along the way they engaged Klingon and Vulcan aliens very much like themselves, a host of changelings that kept them off-balance, and even some non-human forms like the rocky Horta and the reptilian Gorn. But each week neither the crew, nor we who watched from the safety of our living rooms, had an if /or choice to make in what or whom we would encounter. It was always a matter of and. So what was true for the crew of the Enterprise in mythic time is true for us each day of our living in real time..
With this realization firmly in mind, and with Qoheleth’s assurance that “there is nothing better for us than to be happy and enjoy ourselves as long as we live…it is God’s gift,” I will try to look ahead as we launch into 2023—at speeds that sometimes warp my sense of timing—in the hope and faith that all of us will be able to accept and endure the many and(s) that will and must come our way in going where none of us has gone before.
