Believing in Monsters — for Grown Ups
A wet-footed reflection.
I was standing on the dock.
There had been some flooding recently, partly submerging the dock underwater. It was dark, shortly before midnight. I was with a friend of mine. We slowly walked out to the end of the dark. Barefooted.
As we stood on the end of the dock, our feet submerged in water, I was struck by the darkness of the night in the darkness of the water.
In the moonlight, you couldn’t tell the difference between the surface of the water and the night air above it. It gave the impression of an endless space surrounding you. A sort of void you could jump into and fall infinitely down.
The darkness of the water and its perceived endless depth gave me that eerie feeling. Some of us are familiar with it: a fear of the unknown, a fear of what might be obscured or hidden or included in that infinitely large dark space.
I realized in this moment that there was some real, some actual part of me that was genuinely afraid of something that might be in those depths.
And that’s what bothered me.
Because I was unsettled by the darkness and the unknown despite the wealth of scientific knowledge in my head that told me there was nothing of danger in this small North Italian lake. The statistical and scientific likelihood that there was something inside of this tiny body of water that could do me harm—or constitute anything close to a monster—was basically zero.
Despite this clear understanding, something inside of me remained unsettled.
As my friend and I left the dock, I expressed this thought to them. And I realized that the ensuing discussion revealed something else:
Many of my friends do not share the same fear when standing or floating in a dark body of water. They have been able to digest the scientific likelihood of danger and make that their reality.
This got me thinking: what’s different between me and these people?
What is it about us—or about me—that allows this fear, this fear of the unknown, this fear of things beyond logical possibility, to exist?
And what is it about my friends, who no longer have that fear, that’s different from me?
What is it about a person that affords them a daily ocean swim with no thought of sharks, or monsters of the abyss, attacking them?
What is the difference between us?
My conclusion is that there is something about the minds of some people that allows them to continue to have a belief in monsters. To continue to have a belief in that which makes no sense. That is beyond the realm of sensemaking, but could still exist in a certain imagination of things beyond explanation.
A sort of propensity to hold these seemingly conflicting paradigms at once: on the one side, that which is scientifically and logically explainable—what we see and can confirm with our everyday experience—and on the other side, that which can be imagined.
To what extent do we give credence, in our hearts, to that which we can imagine but not verify?
It seems that there are two different types of people: those who give that space, and those who no longer give space to that which can be imagined but not verified. Instead, the entirety of their reality (or at least their internal paradigm) consists of: what have I confirmed, and what have the people that I respect confirmed.
I want to make a case for the survival of the former group. Not because it’s “more correct.” Not because it’s more rational. But because there are good reasons to continue believing in monsters far into adulthood. Good reasons to continue to give power to the imagination.
I believe that while we no longer want to be childish, we should always be childlike.
My words, STT and formatted by chat