Monsters Hiding

When you are a child, always you are on a different wave length.

It is impossible to pass a closet with a half open door revealing a dark and mysterious, foreboding presence. Not only does the possibility of a horrifying monster inhabiting those depths seem very real to the child, but in fact the possibility that an adult’s dismissive reassurance that there is absolutely nothing in the closet

(Look, I’m opening it now. See? There’s nothing in there to be scared of! Now, come on and try and get some sleep, already. It’s late)

seems to be what lacks reality. It provides comfort only for as long as the adult is present, but then the child is left alone to those dire thoughts, fueled by the hyperactive imagination that is the domain of the child.

Maybe menace would be the best word to describe these waking nightmares that the children believe in. Every shadow made by the foliage of the trees, outlined in the moonlight, becomes monsters in the young imagination. When the wind picks up, it not only adds a soundtrack to this horror movie of the child’s mind, but it also adds motion, and breathes life to these horrible visions.

Yes, eventually these fears dissipate. Eventually, we do indeed come to kill that overactive imagination within us, and with it, those nightmares that keep us awake and horrified in the darkness of night, pulling the blanket up as far as we can in the hopes that it will provide us with the protection that we seek. But we come to kill the dream of childhood along with it. Gone forever the ghosts and demons of the monsters and ghosts that populate our childhood bedrooms when alone at night, indeed. But gone forever also is that sweet innocence and easy happiness and delight in the small things, buried by layers and layers of routine, and the endless lessons that well-meaning adults provide for us on how to function.

What are we taught? Well, supposedly responsibility. I say supposedly, because it seems to me open to debate, at best. After all, when was the last time you watched a real news broadcast and felt heartened, glad at how marvelous the world we live in is? We all know the general guidelines that religions, philosophies, and seemingly even common sense would dictate that we are supposed to behave under. Yet, so few actually do it. When you happen to try and live life in an honest manner and play by the rules, it often seems you are punished for it.

What does learning responsibility teach you? It teaches you that the rule of inevitability that we all have to live under is that life will get increasingly more difficult, increasingly more stressful as it goes on. It teaches you indeed to forget about the mysterious monsters of childhood’s imagination, and to believe in the actual monsters of adulthood’s reality. You learn to disbelieve in and forget about the monsters hiding under the bed, and to witness the monstrous acts of so many people around you that make life seem nothing short of unbearable. You learn to stay awake at nights with what we see as “real” fears. Making ends meet, trying to live a successful life by our eyes, struggling to find balance and meaning in these lives of responsibility of ours that seem to be taking such a toll on the entire world. How irresponsible of us.

I would have sworn, all those years ago when I was the one cowering underneath the blanket from those inhuman creatures that always came for a visit at night, but only when all alone, that I would never long to revisit those fears. But I have to admit that in a vastly overpopulated world where being left alone is an increasingly precious commodity, and yet loneliness within the crowd seems increasingly pervading, I sometimes pull the blankets up in the full light of morning, not wanting or wiling to face the very real demons that will chase after me with a measure of relentlessness that those imaginary creatures of the night all those years ago could have learned something from. Drowning in a sea of debt, struggling to keep my head above water and grip the shifting sands underneath my feet to fight the undertow, I sometimes wonder where the solid and stable ground I once knew went to.

The fears that seemed so real to me as a child are now replaced by the all too real fears that the grown version of me knows could threaten my child, still oblivious to the world of responsibility that I now reluctantly and regretfully entered and inhabit. Whether it is from the abuse that seems to run so rampant from irresponsible and sick adults, or whether it is from the abuse that awaits him when he comes of age, and finds that this is a world where people manipulate each other to the extent possible, and that the best any of us can apparently hope for is to find our way enough to provide a relatively comfortable living for ourselves and our loved one. Or whether, perhaps, the threat that I will either be too lax of a parent, and allow the child to grow unbalanced and lacking t values needed to make good decisions for a productive life, or the other extreme, that I might be too overbearing that my child will grow resentful of me, may come to hate me, and try to maintain as safe a distance as possible from me.

The fears and threats are real. That is what responsibility teaches us, and perhaps that makes most of us contribute more towards being part of the problem, rather than part of the solution. We become so fearful of this new reality of these, our responsible lives, that we shut it out as best we can. We close ourselves off to anything but that which provides us comfort, and never challenge ourselves with exposure to anything new. We want to know what awaits, we do not want to be surprised. We want to control our own destiny, and know exactly where we will be five, ten fifteen, thirty years from now. We want to know what our lives mean, and where our lives are taking us. We want to know, and I think that’s the problem.

I do not know what others believe, or think, or say. There are those who follow religions and philosophies and political and economic ideologies that seem to proclaim to have the answers for this life. But watch out! The greater the certainty, the less the flexibility, and therein lies the danger.

To my mind’s eye now, it seems that our need for certainty, for constant reassurance, for the true answers, may actually be the problem. And so I train myself to do what I sense is inevitable, and to allow myself to let go. Stop fighting the undertow, and let the tide carry me where it might. To accept that there are questions that are simply too big for my limited mind and imagination to understand, and to accept the not knowing, the uncertainty. Perhaps, if we can manage to become more comfortable with our not knowing, we might know something other than the constant suffering that we seem to create for ourselves and those around us.

So give me back the monsters in the closet or under the bed. Give me back the fear of the shadows of the trees so closely resembling horrible monsters, and give me back the power of that blanket to pull over my head for more protection, since I now know that there will be no one adult to come in and shed some light, and convince me that the monsters are not real, that they are all in my head. Because those monsters, the ones that did not exist, seem far better than the ones that I now know to be all too real.