Cheat codes

Or, the wisdom of no escape

Do you know how to solve the Kobayashi Maru?

I grew up enmeshed in Star Trek. (I hope I haven't lost any readers with that admission.) I was born in the early 80s with a substantially older brother, which means I lived through season after season of Gene Roddenberry's hope-filled vision of humanity's future, first in The Next Generation and then in Deep Space Nine and eventually (regretfully) Voyager.

But my personality is best exemplified by a narrative from “classic” Star Trek – the Kobayashi Maru featured in the second Star Trek feature film (and brought back in the recent-ish JJ Abrams reboot). The Kobayashi Maru was a sort of final exam simulation for any aspiring starship captain. It sought to teach the inevitability of “no-win” scenarios that would could result in only a suboptimal outcome, ranging from “failure” to “total failure” to “everybody’s dead”.

Star Trek’s brazen hero, Captain Kirk, didn’t like the Kobayashi Maru. He tried again and again to “pass” the test, finally doing so by cheating – hacking the simulation software to allow success. Kirk would go on to encounter a real “no-win” scenario later in the movie, and suffer a grievous loss. The lesson of the story was that no amount of ingenuity can protect you from inevitable tragedy. Yet for some reason, I walked away with the opposite: a surefire belief that if I approach any problem relentlessly enough, creatively enough, that I could “hack the system” and turn certain failure into success.

The end of this week is Rosh HaShanah, the celebration of the Jewish new year. In America, Jews will gather together and great each other with smiles and wishes of “happy new year!” Yet right after the celebration of Rosh HaShanah, observant Jews will mark the Fast of Gedaliah, a minor fast day remembering the first of a sequence of events that would lead to the brutal destruction of Jerusalem and the exile of the Jews. A few days later, Jews will observe the Day of Atonement, Yom Kippur, a complete 25 hour fast in which Jews essentially practice their death.

Happy New Year, indeed.

The Hebrew greeting for the holiday is a little less clear than the English – shanah tovah, literally “happy year”. Was it the previous year that’s happy? The coming year? Some other year entirely?

I don’t mean to be cute here. We tend to look forward to the new year – new opportunities, a time for reinvention, to make good what we have done wrong in the past. One need only look to the stereotypical rise in gym attendance in January to see the optimism that a new year brings with it.

But in truth, every new year may be our last. We count up our birthdays, but every counting up is also a counting down. One more day, one less day. We live in between the two, always balancing.

Last week, I sat on my front porch, watching my two boys play in the front yard, enjoying Vermont’s long summer hangover that’s keeping the fall at bay. Seeing their love for each other inspired my own wellspring of love and joy. But along with those feelings came the realization that life cannot be better than this moment – a moment of quiet presence, in love.

And these moments will cease. The best case scenario is still one that ends with an empty nest, my own physical falling away, my own inevitable last breath. Nothing can prevent this decline, just as nothing can permanently extend Vermont’s summer. The world turns; winter comes.

“What real value is there for a man / In all the gains he makes beneath the sun?” asks Koheleth, the author of the Biblical book of Ecclesiastes. “One generation goes, another comes / But the earth remains the same forever”.

Last weekend, I celebrated the life of my late father-in-law Kevin Kennedy, who died last month after a battle with pancreatic cancer. Several eulogizers celebrated Kevin’s hanging on to life for as long as he could. Less than a week before his death, Kevin still made the trek from northern Virginia to Baltimore for one of his favorite pastimes, watching the Orioles with his wife Pam at Camden Yards. And shortly before that, Kevin had made the much longer trip to visit us in Vermont, a clear struggle for him physically that he powered through with his characteristic grace.

Yet it’s not the “raging against the dying of the light” for which I will most remember Kevin. It’s the opposite: memories of his quietly sitting with the boys as they played all around him, or of his reading a book to them as they cozied up closely. Kevin was known for his projects, and his normal vigor would have had him performing any number of helpful fixes around the property. Instead, his flagging energy in the last year resulted in a greater amount of sitting. And that sitting resulted in these moments of loving presence.

“All is empty breath” observes Ecclesiastes. And there’s no arguing with this wise Biblical sage. Life grows. Life fades. New life comes. Years pass from one to another, some good, some not.

Breath may be empty, but what of the moment between inhale and exhale? The liminal space where past and future blur together? This space, if we notice it, if we sit with it, if we fill it with love, is limitless.

I hate no-win scenarios. I’ve fought them my whole life. (And yes, I was a terribly sore loser for all of my childhood, and a regrettable portion of early adulthood.) But growing older has taught me that life is not a simulation you can hack. There’s only one exit, and it comes for all of us.

Your age doesn’t measure how much you’ve lived. You can go years without paying attention to a single moment. Gain of this kind is only loss – lost time, lost opportunity, lost capacity for magic.

After reading this, I invite you to close your eyes, and think of an any person in your life, past or present, that inspires love. Exhale. Slowly breathe in. Slowly breathe out. Be present with your love, and fill the space between.

That's it. That's the cheat code. You just beat the Kobayashi Maru.

Rest in peace, Kevin.