Klingons. Why Did It Have To Be Klingons?

In my dream, I was a Starfleet officer in command of a small unit serving aboard a Klingon battle cruiser. The Executive Office took a disliking to us (or maybe just me) and began calling my unit out for pointless “emergency” drills 20 or 30 minutes before we were scheduled to wake up. I tried to talk to him about it, and he told me that Klingon warriors were always ready for battle on a moment’s notice, and that if we were to serve on his ship, we needed to be ready as well. 

Well, after the third or fourth time, I’d had enough. I told my crew that if it happened again, they were not, under any circumstances, to report for duty until I ordered them to do so. They agreed. Sure enough, two or three days later, the XO called for us to report well before our scheduled duty shift.

I was ready. I had already awakened and dressed, and I was on the bridge about 90 seconds after the call came in. The XO asked where the rest of my team was, and I looked around the bridge and responded that there was no need for them to be here, as there was no emergency to be found. He didn’t like that answer. That didn’t stop me. I then proceeded to tell him that this kind of passive-aggressive nonsense was the sort of thing I’d expect from a Romulan bureaucrat, not a Klingon warrior. I then also suggested that his mother probably consorted with Cardassians, or that she might even be a Cardassian herself.

That did it. He drew a knife and charged me.

In a stunning display of grace and expertise—the surest sign that all of this was nothing but a dream—I blocked his initial thrust and then executed a perfect disarm maneuver. He stood there enraged, staring at his knife in my hand. I turned away from him and walked over to the Captain, giving him the knife and asking him to hold on to it, as his First Officer might eventually want it back. The XO came at me again. I continued to block and dodge his clumsy strikes until I was able to maneuver him into a control panel headfirst. He fell in a shower of sparks, rising unsteadily to his feet only after a few moments.

As he stood there, I loudly reaffirmed the loyalty of myself and my unit to him, to the Captain, and to the ship. I furthermore informed him that if he ever pulled this kind of targs**t again, he’d have a real emergency on his hands as he found himself floating back to Qo'noS in an escape pod. I excused myself from the bridge and went back to my barracks to wake up my unit. We reported for duty exactly on time.

The XO found me in the mess hall later. He had another knife—one he said was for me. He insisted that my unit and I share a bottle of bloodwine with him. It wasn’t the 2309, but it wasn’t bad.

(The fact that this dream woke me up 20 minutes before my alarm on my first day back to school probably means something, but I don’t want to think too hard about what.)

Big Red and the Wall of Doom

One summer in my early twenties, I was a counselor at a summer camp for gifted and talented youth. One of our activities was a high ropes course, and the group of kids I was shepherding was directed to our first feature: the climbing wall. It was eighteen or twenty feet tall and straight vertical. It was big, it was imposing, and nobody wanted to be the first to attempt it.

Until Big Red stepped up. 

Big Red was a student I already knew, because our families were friends. Her mom was the psychologist at the middle school where my Mom was a teacher. I’d known Big Red for years. That wasn’t her real name, of course. She’d got the nickname because she had long, curly red hair--and she stood about five-foot-nothing. She was tiny by any objective measure, but her smile and her heart were anything but.

So after a moment or two, Big Red came forward. She hooked the guide rope to her harness, approached the wall, and began climbing. She climbed like there was nothing to stop her--and there wasn’t. She reached the top in about 30 seconds. 

And then everything changed. All of a sudden, everyone wanted a shot at the wall. The other students all seemed to think, “Hey, if she can do it, why not me?” It was as if she had given the rest of us permission to dare the wall. And we did.

As you go about the activities of your day, completing your daily goals and defeating your daily monsters, you may not even be aware of the people around you. They have goals and monsters of their own, and seeing you conquer yours may just give them the strength they need to conquer theirs. All they need is to be shown the way to begin, to see that it is possible.

By doing what you do, steadily and faithfully, you may be somebody’s Big Red.

And you don’t need to be exceptional to do it. Success, I have found, is not a matter of gifts or talents, but of will. If you have the will, you can find the way.

So don’t give up. Do what you need to do--little things, mundane things, unremarkable things. In so doing, you might just be giving someone else the strength to do the same.