Feelings, Are They Really a Security Risk?
Any of you that know me know that I'm a Star Trek fan. I don't go to conventions or dress up as Mr. Spock, but I do love the vision Gene Roddenberry created for our future.
The latest episode of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds was interesting. It was the first Star Trek episode done as a musical, which, on paper, sounds like the dumbest idea ever.
Strangely, they actually pulled it off and the music was great (and I don't usually like musicals). The main plot point (spoiler alert) was that they fed music from the Great American Songbook into quantum uncertainty field and it changed reality so people would break into song whenever their emotions became too intense, which resulted in sharing those feelings with everyone in the room.
The tension comes from the fact that this sharing of innermost feelings with others is viewed, at least on a starship, as a security risk. And it struck me that many of us have this same perspective, especially when the stakes get high. For many of us, including me, we tend to be:
- Professional instead of vulnerable
- Serious instead of lighthearted
- Guarded instead of forthright
Anyway, you get the idea. We're afraid that our feelings - of who we are and what we believe - are a security risk. But the result is that we blend into the noise instead of standing out in the world as our unique selves.
So I've vowed to start putting myself out there more, at least as long as I'm not a crew member on a starship. Do you want to join me?
Solo Together,
Joe Rando
