Claire Legrand

It is almost 2:00 in the morning. I lie here, fumbling for a comfortable position, waiting for calm to find me.

I’ve been waiting for hours.

The thing about life is, it’s one giant Kobayashi Maru test. You know what that is, right? It’s this test from Star Trek, which sounds funny — haha, Star Trek, cheesy special effects, nerds in basements — but first of all, if you think that about Star Trek, we can no longer be friends, and secondly, the Kobayashi Maru test is not funny at all.

It’s a test young military officers have to take before they can graduate. It’s a test you can’t pass, a no-win scenario. The point of the test is not for you to beat it (I’m talking to you, James Kirk), but rather to measure how you handle it.

Life is like that. No matter what trendy Internet vernacular says, you can’t really win at life. You can’t beat life. At the end of the day, it isn’t how you die or how much money you make; you can’t really compete with others and rank lives according to greatness because living is subjective. Who are we to say that someone else’s life is greater or lesser than ours? One man’s trash is another man’s treasure; one man’s destitution is another man’s boundless riches. One man’s tragedy could contain a jewel greater than the entire sum of another man’s triumphs.

And at the end of the day, everyone lives and everyone dies, and everyone goes on to whatever is next, or goes on to nothing.

You can’t get out of that; you can’t cheat the inevitability of death; even Voldemort couldn’t do that.

What matters is how we live. How do we handle the Kobayashi Maru test that is life?

Do we take the plunge? Do we try for the impossible, do we dare to love deeply and wildly? Even though the opposite of these highs are lows more bottomless than the deepest hellish inferno, even though by dreaming and imagining and striving for what others say can’t be done, shouldn’t be done, can’t be done we risk unimaginable failure, despair, loneliness?

We don’t have to; we can stay safe. We can stay stable. We can only love halfway, never quite giving away our full hearts. We can reach for only unremarkable heights, because the higher you reach, the more spectacular the potential crash; and if we reach only as far as we can around our middles without stretching ourselves too much, there’s little danger of disaster.

This, of course, is a Kobayashi Maru test in itself: Do we try for ecstasy and risk catastrophe? Or do we choose stability, steadiness, safety? Do we open ourselves to all experience and ambition, to all emotion? Or do we remain closed off, never running too fast, never flying too high?

Huge stakes or small stakes? High risk or low risk? Uncertainty or guarantees?

Either way, we are hurt — whether from action, or inaction; whether it is a piercing, violent pain or something subtler than that, more muted, less immediately agonizing.

Lots of things in my own life recently have posed these questions to me. I’m afraid of what’s coming, of what I’ve committed to, and at times, I admit, I’ve been tempted toward safety, toward the road free of twists and turns, bumps and bruises and bloody knees. It would be so much easier. It helps the knots of fear unwind, to imagine traveling down this road.

But what about those mountains over there, with their steel-slick precipices and glorious summits? What about the valleys, the bogs, the temptestuous oceans rolling to shore?

I want to see what secrets they hold. They are not kind, these places; they are shaped by both happy and unhappy chance.

But their secrets. What of those? I want to know them, no matter what.

If I must take the Kobayashi Maru test, and fail, as everyone must, I will do so not meekly, not dispassionately, not hiding behind my fears and my desire for straight, clean roads. I won’t cheat the test, either, trying to find a way out of it. I will barrel through this test with grace and verve, guns blazing, sparks flying. I will risk doom, and I will risk bliss.

Come with me?