What Mission Impossible 8 Taught Me

We're having a lovely evening. Dinner with my parents, my brother, and our son -I made great-grandma's homemade pizza, which, I must admit, tasted amazing. Then my husband turns on the last Mission Impossible movie, and the next thing I know, I'm learning about my fears on a spiritual level. Thank you, my beloved husband! This is definitely what I had planned for this evening (not).

Around the Second Act's climax of Mission: Impossible -Final Reckoning, Ethan Hunt has to swim out of a submarine, into the murky, black depths of the deep, deep ocean, to an abandoned submarine to find The Entity's AI source code in order to exterminate this new almost all-powerful threat.

The whole notion of Skynet and iRobot are an entirely separate and real concern of mine, one that has me reserved to jump on the AI train, but it's this is the scene that has me writhing in my seat, dread crawling over me like octopus appendages as I watch Ethan sink deeper and deeper into the abyss.

Since I was young, I've had fears of being swept away by waves far stronger than anything I could hope to be. Tsunamis? Forget about it. Those were fodder for my nightmares. Literally. I could always deduce my stress levels by the form that water took in my dreams. Large waves meant an overwhelming amount of stress. Fog equated to uncertainty or muddled options. This is ironic for a Pisces water sign, right? Water should be a source of tranquility. And usually, I agree. It is calming and life giving.

But the other side to the coin is destructive might that can smother life. Unchecked. Unbalanced, raw, unrestricted power scares me. Power left unchecked destroys. Similarly, endless darkness without any sense of grounding -no earth to orient- just endless floating in darkness without air -this scares me too. Existence without engagement is not living. I can make further connections to tsunamis and unchecked power to abusive relationships, or connect endlessly floating in an abyss to apathy and suicidal ideation, but I'll not touch these topics further in this blog. These were the deeper connections that I probed to make.

And this is how the last movie in the series, Mission: Impossible -Final Reckoning, taught me deeper truths about myself. Thank you for giving me a highly uncomfortable scene to probe deeper into my psyche. I emphasize, no matter how uncomfortable.

"To know thyself is the beginning of wisdom."

Mission: Impossible -Final Reckoning Ethan dives into the ocean depths