Return Trip

“Master Wayne, it's been a long time…
Are you coming back to Gotham for long, sir?”

Well, I’m down to my last four days in Utah. It’s hard to believe that I’ve been here for six years. It’s even harder to believe that I’ve been away from home for eight. EIGHT YEARS! Jeez, even Bruce Wayne was only away from Gotham for seven years when he left for HIS training.

“You will go to the Degobah system. There you will learn from
Yoda, the Jedi Master who instructed me.”

I guess in a way you could look at is as that: training. There’s a certain kind of growth that a person can’t get when he’s close to his family. Look at Superman, he never realized HIS powers until he left Smallville. And Luke Skywalker never made any REAL progress toward becoming a Jedi Knight until he left his friends and headed for Degobah.

“That place...is strong with the dark side of the Force.

A domain of evil it is. In you must go.”

“What’s in there?”

“Only what you take with you.”

Heck, even on Degobah, Luke had to face things on his own. During my time in Utah (hmm, that even kinda SOUNDS like Degobah) I’ve met some fantastic friends and have had great times with them, but I’ve also had some very solitary times. Sometimes disappointment has left me feeling alone and at other times, by my own design, I’ve arranged for the solitude of living alone. I think part of the reason that I stayed away for so long was so I COULD be alone, because despite its negative connotations solitude can help a person come into his own.

“You don't need to be helped any longer.
You've always had the power to go back to [Kent].”

The funny thing about “coming into one’s own” or discovering oneself is that it’s like discovering anything else in this universe: the thing you’re discovering has always been there, but sometimes it takes work to find it. You’ve got to put forth effort and expose yourself to it before its truly discovered. Some people find themselves very quickly and some people never even misplace themselves.

“Oh the cleverness of me!”

I’d consider myself a conglomerate of all those types of people: I’ve never like I DIDN’T know who I was and after all this time on my own I don’t feel like I’ve changed at all, but I think that everyone should take time for introspection because you’ll find that you’re a lot more impressive than you had imagined. Now… I’ve always thought quite highly of myself, so you can imagine how much more self enamored I must be now that I’ve improved upon my confidence.

“Your eyes can deceive you. Don't trust them…

Stretch out with your feelings.”

Every now and then I’ll have a sort of “out-of-time” experience. I say out-of-time because its like an out-of-body experience, only I’m still in my body and I’m still myself, but for a second I can feel things that I know I wont feel for a few more years. Like when I was at BYU, I can remember hating my trips up to campus because campus was always so crowded and hurried and there was always a class I was late for or an assignment that was almost due. But near the end of my senior year, still in the thick of that hustle and bustle, I can remember my frustrations stepping aside for a second and feeling like, “Wow, I’m not going to be here much longer and I can already tell I’m gonna miss this place.”

"You make it out to Utah much, Saul?"

"Not as much as I'd like."

"You should. You'd like it. I think you'd like Provo."