When I was a very young child, I used to be unreasonably scared of the dark: I had to have a nightlight, an adult awake when I was going to sleep, and of course, my trusty anti-ghost water gun under my pillowcase. Then, as I grew older, I developed this irrational fear that I would somehow swim out to the deep end of the beach and a tide would submerge me into a watery prison where I would be unable to orientate myself and ultimately suffocate under the salty weight of the sea. Safe to say, that never happened. Over time, I lost my emotional connection to these fears, outgrowing or simply not experiencing them enough to really believe in the danger anymore.
Then, one day as I was looking out onto the blackened and star-spotted sky, I felt that same level of fear. I stared at the moon and could feel it eyeing me down with some kind of mal intent. I was paranoid that if I looked away, the moon would creep closer and closer until it hovered right in front of my face, completely obstructing my entire world. It was absolutely terrifying to me how lonely and small I felt in the wake of this unbelievably large rock. Now, maybe I was experiencing my midlife crisis at age ten, but this experience stuck with me. Every time I look at the moon, I feel the same hollowness. Throughout elementary school, high school, and my undergraduate, I was fascinated by astronomy (not so much the Gemini, Libra, etc. stuff) and my existence in relation to everything else. Ironically, I never excelled in science and was genuinely disinterested in almost everything science-related (minus chemistry, shoutout to balancing equations); it was just this one interest that I had that I couldn’t quite contextualize. As I learned more and became intrigued by photos of different moons and planets, visual ideas of what other galaxies might contain, and the composition of planets we may never see ourselves, I felt smaller and smaller. The moon was getting closer, and I couldn’t stop it.
It took me a while to understand why I felt so hopeless and hollow in connection to what I was viewing. While my high school geography class scaring me into believing an asteroid was going to hit Earth at any moment certainly didn’t help, it was in that introspective panic that I realized something: The unknown is the scariest thing I can imagine. It didn’t scare me to know that it was dark—it scared me to know that I didn’t know what was in the dark. Was I scared of drowning in the deep ocean? Yeah, probably. But most of all, I was scared of not drowning at all; I was scared of floating down into the darkness, watching the sun breathe its last breaths as it all turned to nothing. Moons, galaxies, and black holes aren’t scary because they’re large—they’re scary because of how little we know of them.
The sooner you realize that the unknown exists, the sooner you become content with the fact that the unknown is a staple of life. Imagine a world where your whole life is planned out for you on an Excel spreadsheet given to you at birth. In this dystopian world, your fate is already sealed the moment you take your first breath, and your actions or inactions contribute nothing to that. Personally, that’s a terrifying thought because of how ingrained the North American idea of self-help and the ability to influence outcomes is. Of course, there’s comfort in knowing what you know; people seek stability in chaos whenever possible. Securing a stable job, having a consistent routine, speaking the same way all contribute to stability and make us feel in control. But what about the 2:00 a.m. decisions, the unexpected gifts from a loved one, the trips to a foreign country? The unknown is often what drives us and excites us and the unquenchable thirst for exploration has long been implanted within society. We usually like to look before we leap, but sometimes leaping is the only way to look.
Maybe I’ll never stop feeling a weak sense of dread whenever I look out onto the sky, but that doesn’t matter. I know that I don’t know what I don’t know, and I knowingly accept that fact. The unknown is what excites me, and if there were a book with all the secrets of the universe, I would close it as soon as I saw it (after finding out the March Madness bracket for each year so I can collect my one billion dollars from Warren Buffet).