Luke Skywalker: Like My Father Before Me

Everyone knows, at the end of the Star Wars original trilogy, the end of Return of the Jedi, Luke Skywalker defeats Darth Vader in a lightsaber duel. The Emperor, who’s just been watching this whole thing like a parent at their child’s baseball game, laughs and tells Luke to kill Vader and “take you father’s place at my side.” But instead Luke throws away his lightsaber and announces,

“Never. I'll never turn to the Dark Side. You have failed, Your Highness. I am a jedi, like my father before me.”

Isn’t that a strange thing to say? “Like my father before me.” This is Luke’s crowning moment, his great defiance, proof that he is too strong, at least too morally strong, to be pulled to the dark side. And he chooses to say, “Like my father before me?” His father is currently laying at his feet, minus one arm. Even before that, his father was a sith lord, half machine, and a total jerk who had turned to the dark side and been mean for literally decades. Yes, Vader was once a jedi, but he totally failed at it. So, Luke Skywalker, I ask you, seriously ol' buddy, why associate yourself with Vader in your moment of triumph?

Literally everyone has parents. And all parents, being human and fallible, screw up in lots of ways. And their children share their DNA and were (if the parents stuck around) influenced by their parents’ screw ups. So every child eventually asks themselves: am I my father’s/mother’s son/daughter, doomed to fall to the dark side like they did?

When Luke refers to his father, the jedi, he is referring to the aspects of his father that he, at that moment, has successfully embodied. He learned the pitfalls that destroyed Vader, and he now has faced those same pitfalls in himself and succeeded.

Literally everyone can do this. We cannot run from our own DNA, but we can all learn from our parents’ mistakes, succeed where they faltered, and become what they failed to be. Once we’ve achieved that, we can proudly declare our association with them, with the parts of them we have chosen, with their jedi selves. Even though they totally failed at being jedi, we can become what they were meant to be: a jedi, like my father before me.

What If

What if something terrible happens?

I have never been in a fight, not a real one anyway. But in my head I've met my end in a plethora of ways: sword fights, fist fights, bottle fights. Just like the eight thousand and one times I've been stabbed in the back while out for a walk (in my head). Just like the six hundred times I've been abducted by aliens or monstrous beings from other dimensions (in my head). I do this on a moment to moment basis. I wake up doing this. I fall asleep literally to a lullaby of this. This is the soundtrack of my life constantly playing, sometimes louder, sometimes softer, but always playing.

I brush my teeth imagining what it would be like if I were arrested for someone else's crime. I floss daydreaming about the apocalypse. I shave to the melody of “what if,” “what if,” “what if.” What if the subway derails while we're going over a bridge? What if my permit to live in Canada is revoked? What if my wife gets sick and we don't have the money to heal her? What if one of the friends I've shown my novel to betrays me and somehow steals the copyright to it, leaving me so depressed that I can never write again? What if robbers? What if cockroaches? What if disease? What if an accident? What if storms or hail or war? What if mind-reading paratrooper shapeshifter alien vampires?

There are people who prepare for unfortunate situations. They do this by recognizing likely scenarios, planning accordingly, and not thinking about the millions of extremely unlikely possibilities that there is no way to actually prevent except by locking yourself in your house (and even that won't prevent all of them). These people innately know a basic truth: no amount of mental questioning can ready you for the unpredictable, unlikely madness of what actually happens. Not even for vampires. When the apocalypse comes, it will be bizarre and unimaginable. When calamity strikes, it will always be a fresh wound. I've never, ever, readied myself for a real event using 'what if.' I’ve never realized a fatal flaw in a plan using 'what if.' I’ve never soothed myself regarding something scary using 'what if.' All that 'what if' does is multiply anxiety a thousand-fold in an infinite loop of mental creation. I create planets in my own mind, filled with nothing but anxiety. I’ve tossed aside basic physics to make room for more worry and fear amongst the limited neurons in my brain. And I know that this massive construction project is never going to be worth the effort.

But it’s habit now. Years of practice. Decades of teaching myself that literally anything can be a prompt for 'what if.' By the time life taught me that this habit was useless, I had already become an expert. So, what now? Is all this space in my brain permanently wasted? Maybe not. What if an expert in making bombs used his skills to defuse explosives? What if an expert in robbery used his knowledge to thief-proof people's houses? If those things can happen, maybe an expert in 'what if' can turn a method for creating anxiety into a tool for producing hope.

What if something good happens?

The Coming of An Accountant to the Great Plains of Merna

The great plains of Merna, though they were, as their name implied, great, and had held that title since before human language had been invented, had never in their long career seen the likes of Rayfield the accountant.

A thousand years before Rayfield was born, a herd of centaurs from Tafril came through the forests of Ern into the wide, rolling hills of the great plains of Merna. Their armor and spears glittered in the bright morning sun as they marched, crushing the grass and the dirt into a road of mud in their wake. Their captain, the largest centaur ever born, galloped in the lead, standing nearly four meters tall. They marched the length of the plains, shaking the earth as the went, and then continued onwards to some horrible war where they all died.

But still, nothing quite like Rayfield the accountant had ever come to the great plains of Merna.

A thousand years before the centaurs’ march, a meteorite plummeted through the atmosphere with a tail of fire crackling behind it, and by the time it touched the ground of the great plains of Merna, it had burned away until only a crumb remained. But it was a fiery crumb, and rain had not fallen on the plains for nearly a year, so the grass was easily lit. The fire burned away six square miles of dry yellow grass before it stopped.

In the fresh ash, strange new plants grew up, for the meteorite had brought more than fire down with it from the outer reaches. These new plants grew quickly, and their leaves glittered like diamonds. Their shining refractions of light drew flies and men alike amongst the fields of otherworldly plants. None ever returned.

The king of the nearby kingdom of Brendal lost seventy of his best knights and his only son to those fields. He wept a single tear for the knights, but for his son he mumbled two words to his most trusted sorcerer: "Burn them." The sorcerer, who had been beside the king since the day he was born and had never spoken a single word to any other man, knew what the king meant. He hurried away and locked himself in a secret room in the tallest tower of the castle. Heart-rending melodies floated from this tower for three days and nights. Then, an expendable scout was sent to check the great plains of Merna and the fields of glittering plants from which no man or fly had yet returned. But return the scout did, reporting that he had found nothing of the shining plants but ash on the bare soil. Normal grasses soon grew up again, and no one ever spoke of the glittering otherworldly plants, the seventy knights, or the king's son ever again.

An unfathomable number of beautiful, horrible, and somewhat-impossible things had happened in the great plains of Merna. And so many other, mundane things had happened as well. Nearly every eventually had taken place there at least twice. But nothing even slightly similar to the coming of Rayfield, the accountant, had ever happened.

To his credit, Rayfield was no ordinary accountant. He was the most skilled of his firm, and for that reason he, and he alone, had been entrusted by his jealous colleagues with the prestigious and usually deadly task of confronting Valentino the gangster about his back taxes. However, the blunt honest fact was this: nothing like Rayfield the accountant had every happened there because nothing as mundane as a shortish man in an overpriced suit had ever gotten lost enough to be able to arrive at the great plains of Merna.