It's Time to Stop Being Afraid of the Dark
A few of my most valuable realizations about life, love, and leaping into the unknown.
When I was a kid, I was terrified of the dark. I saw everything in the shadows. Monsters, murderers, ghosts, ghouls, and horrors. I couldn’t sleep unless there was a light on in my room at night. That night, usually from a small television set, soothed me to sleep and told me that I was safe…so long as I stayed on the right side of the light.
As an adult, I quickly learned that life was much the same way.
If you wanted to be successful, if you wanted to be safe, you had to stay on the light side. You had to walk the path. Choose the known. Go with the flow or risk being thrown outside it, into the dusky trails of the treacherous unknown.
The unknown is shadow. It is that great big precipice with nothing on the other side but swirling mists of chance and possibility. Hope lives there, true. But so does failure. So do those sides of ourselves that we’d rather not show anyone else.
The problem is, we can’t set sail without embracing that leap into the black waters of chance. We can’t truly test our mettle, or achieve our dreams until we’re willing to take a gamble of faith…in ourselves.
What Andre Gide said is true.
“You cannot cross an ocean until you have courage to lose sight of the shore.”
That willingness doesn’t come easy. And it doesn’t come free. It comes when we are confident, self-aware, and clear on what we want and where we’re going next (even when we don’t fully know what that “next” is.)
It’s the eternal human problem of both being and not being. Having command of our lives, of our futures, and still being entirely at the mercy of Fate’s reckless hands.
No creature in the universe would admire our position should they see the truth of it.
All the same, I realized (as I’m sure you did too) that eventually, I had to let go of my fear. If life were to be an endless dance of leaping into the shadows, what good was a fear of them? I had to learn to embrace all that I was and all that I wasn’t. I had to embrace my smallness in the hands of time and the magnitude of infinity.
What good is being afraid of the dark when our universe is filled with it? When it offers us so much god-damned opportunity?
It’s not really a rhetorical question, not really.
As big and consequential as life seems in the weight of the present moment, it is a temporary game and low stakes. What passes in our lifetime will come to be and then cease to be. In 20, 50, 100 years, no one will remember it and most of us will be forgotten too. As distance to our sense of self as a pioneer ancestor is to their Gen-Z micro-influencing grandchild.
It’s time for all of us to stop being afraid of the dark.
It’s time for us to imagine a better future through the clouds and the upset.
Upheaval is inevitable. So too is the suffering of the human spirit. If we should do these things, should we not do them for the right reasons? Should we not guide our suffering into some better shape for the world that comes tomorrow? It seems a funny thing to ask.
Abandon fear for the sake of embracing new and unknown fears.
Yes, it seems mad, but beneath it there is logic. There is…opportunity as yet untapped in the width and breadth of our potential for change.
I say to embrace the darkness of uncertainty. The fuzzy focus of a future we’ve never lived. Embrace what could still be.
On this path, there is only ruin. We have seen it repeated in the generations of suffering we hoist onto one another. But on that path? The overgrown one? Now, that is land uncharted. That is possibility.
© E.B. Johnson 2024
Support my work. Tap the button below to subscribe and join the growing list of my premium supporters. All for less than a coffee!
Great article! I needed to hear this.