Moving from a new place

I was listening to "Talk of the Nation" on NPR today, and the guest was an author who wrote a book aimed toward those coming out of prison and looking to succeed "on the outside." At one point, he talked about "moving from a different place," the idea being that most people who spend a substantial amount of time in the clink always relate everything back to prison. They talk about it in therapy and support groups. They think about it when reacting to situations they encounter. A story always seems to come up about when they were in the can. They think about that one time this thing happened in the courtyard. You can't do that if you want to succeed. You must find a different frame of mind to "move from" to relate to the world around you.

It brought up something for me. Brace yourself for a "How an episode of Star Trek changed my life" story. Call me a geek, but the themes are significant. As a matter of fact, don't call me a geek. Just listen:

In the inceptional episodes (it was a two-parter) of the series "Star Trek: Deep Space Nine" (the best series, by the way), the captain, Benjamin Sisko, is traveling through a worm hole to the Delta Quadrant (a worm hole is a passage through the space-time continuum...just Google it) that was just discovered. They make it, and on the return trip, the ship is stopped at some "place" and he gets out and has an encounter with these "entities" which interact with him through his memories. He goes somewhere in his memory and these entities take on the "cloak" of the people there. The memories keep changing and he goes to several different ones. However, they keep ending up at the tragic memory of where he lost his wife in an attack on the ship they were traveling in. After ending up there for the third or fourth time, he angrily asks the entities "Why do you keep bringing me back here?" Their reply is striking and unexpected: We are not taking you anywhere. You are the one moving. Why do you keep bringing us back here?

That question struck me then, and it made me realize that it was I who was choosing to keep going back to the memories of hurts and wrongs. I kept living in the pain by my own decision. But I wasn't sure what it meant I needed to do. Listening to NPR today cued me into that answer. I need to choose to move from that new place. I need to find that place of love and peace, and go out in my life from there.

Now the questions of "Where is that place?" and "How do I learn to move from there?" are what I'm faced with. That's pretty exciting, because I've been sitting on the "What do I need to do?" for about a year.

Answers are long in coming. However, that's just part of the journey. I can live with answers that take a while. Besides, the quick ones are rarely worth having.

Blessings