The Inner Light

The Star Trek episode, The Inner Light, was, in my opinion, rediculous and funny, and i can see why we watched it and how it highlighted the theme "the 20 minute lifetime"
Obviously Captain Piccard, in his nucleonic beam induced stupor, lived out his entire lifetime in roughly 20-25 minutes. In order for him to accept his fate/reality, as it were, he had to find out, or rediscover, who he was and where he was. This reminds me of the Futurama episode where Lela is stung by a giant bee and dies, but really thinks Fry is the one who was stung. Throughout the episode she tries to convince herself that Fry is still alive (even though she's in a coma) until she begins to go crazy imagining a life without Fry. Long story short, Fry gives Lela some of his possessions to remind her of him and the world she has temporarily left behind. Similarly, Captain Piccard's friends and family put his old flute in the spaceship so he will remember them and remember to tell their story. Unforgetting the forgotten. It is he who must retell this story, and relive out his past life. You can relate this to Eliot's 4 Quartets, Page 31, last stanza:

Home is where one starts from. As we grow older
The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated
Of dead and living. Not the intense moment
Isolated, with no before and after,
But a lifetime burning in every moment
And not the lifetime of one man only
But of old stones that cannot be deciphered.
There is a time for the evening under starlight,
A time for the vening under lamplight
(The evening with the photograph album).
Love is most nearly itself
When here and now cease to matter.

Essentially, we need to arrive where we started, but realize that we are again back at the same place, realize how we've changed throughout our journey and change.