Miller: Oh. My. God. What happened to your eyes?</p>
Dr. Weir: Where we're going, we won't need eyes to see.
Miller: What are you talking about?
Dr. Weir: I created the Event Horizon to reach the stars, but she's gone much, much farther than that. She tore a hole in our universe, a gateway to another dimension. A dimension of pure chaos. Pure... evil. When she crossed over, she was just a ship. But when she came back... she was alive! Look at her, Miller. Isn't she beautiful?
Miller: Your "beautiful" ship killed its crew, Doctor.
Dr. Weir: Well... now she has another crew. Now she has us.
The Point of No Return
An event horizon is the boundary from within no matter or even light itself can escape the seductive pull of a black hole*. We've all felt the gravity of important life changing decisions, you know the ones that really matter as opposed to the ones we think matter. There's a moment right after the decision where we question the choice made, but realize it's already too late to go back, we've crossed the event horizon.
Without event horizon's in our life we'd constantly be taking mulligans or be distracted by the opportunity to replay painful mistakes in hopes of creating a better outcome. This is no way to live. And fortunate for us this isn't the way the world works despite our mind's haunted visions telling us otherwise.
Should we always burn the bridge behind us?
What if we need to step back or is revisiting old choices already a mistake?
Aren't they new choices given a change of circumstances?
There's little doubt we make our best decisions with a fresh mental state. In the simplest cases you can see how many people strive for a zero inbox by performing a search. Almost 3 million web pages come up for zero inbox. How about white boards, is yours cluttered or clean? Look at your desktop, are there distractions waiting to draw just a fragment of your attention away from the important stuff? A little mental house cleaning goes a long way, and it's a large part of why I blog each morning. Dumping my mind's cache so that I'm ready for a new problem to tackle.
The backstory of this post is a good friend of mine who's going through a rough spot. After he revisited the charming movie that this post is titled after, he's come to see the film as a tragic love story about Dr. Weir (Sam Neill) dealing with the loss of his wife.
Notes:
* = that's not quite true. Black holes have polar radiation of very high energy photons and this emission eventually leads to the end of the gravity well