Spooky Things
A spider in your room. Footsteps in the night. Something in your house moves when you know you’re alone. The leftovers in the fridge you had planned to eat are gone. Your friend posts self-help advice on social media that you know has something to do with what’s going on in their own life. You gaze into the void and the void returns your gaze. Fate whispers to you, “A storm is coming,” and you reply, “I don’t own an umbrella.” You receive mail from the IRS. A clown.
There are many spooky things, and oftentimes people address them by not addressing them. I prefer to have someone else take care of a spider rather than myself. I also prefer to stay where I am rather than investigate the noise I may or may not have heard in another room when I’m alone. But when October comes—when Halloween comes—spookiness is embraced. It’s a reminder that sometimes we should look at and address the dark, unknown, and scary things going on—both around us and within us. Do you feel that? That chill in the air? That’s the feeling of your awareness expanding.
Or maybe it’s just the temperature. In any case, this month’s been so crazy and busy (personally) I haven’t gotten the chance to be fully aware of all that’s going on. Lots of stuff is going on, much of it spooky for better or worse. I find the spookiest of things to be when you become cognizant of something about yourself; it could be about a mistake you made but you didn’t know at the time or a behavior you revile in others that shockingly rears its ugly head in you. The lack of awareness is spooky on its own, but from my own experience the gaining of awareness is much spookier. It’s why I typically choose the less spooky option of ignoring and avoiding. Some random psychologist once said, “That which you most need will be found where you least want to look.”
“That which you most need will be found where you least want to look.”
Just kidding, I know who said that. It was Carl Jung. He also said, “No tree can grow to Heaven unless its roots reach down to Hell.” I’m not one for religion, but I imagine there’s nary a spookier place than Hell. Of course, I understand it metaphorically as that’s the way he was speaking. Positives and negatives go hand-in-hand. Conditionally. Yin and Yang. You can’t be happy without being unhappy, full without being hungry, nor normal without being SpooOoooOOoooky. Well, you don’t necessarily have to be spooky, but the gist is there’s a (non-mathematical) principle of variances. Without differences or change, there’s less, if any, awareness of what one thought, felt, or experienced before.
This has mostly been a stream-of-thought blog post about my thoughts of the spooky season and its relation to the tendency of the human condition to tactically obfuscate ugly things. Of course, it’s not great to obsess over them, either. A quote from the game Superliminal cheekily goes like this: “The worst thing you can do is focus on negativity. It won't spare you from the cage of death, the pain of disease, the cruelty of time, the cold shell of human nature or the eventual loss of everything you've ever held dear. Whatever you do, don't focus on that!” But also don’t completely ignore or forget about the spooky things. It could be real ugly and spooky when they show up.
That’s about it. Something I’ve been keeping in the back of my mind—slightly obfuscated—is NaNoWriMo next month. Very spooky. Happy Halloween!
