My life is littered with fables. There are so many made-up notions of reality my culture has taught me that it has been hard for me to be open to the unknown. There has been an answer for nearly everything.
Wanting to be certain, it has been hard for me to embrace the unknown, uncertain and undefined. My fellow humans have obliged by filling in most of the blank spaces. My culture has taught me how to relate to the world in ways that have little to do with experience or reality. I have been taught to believe, when to know was momentarily out of reach. Even science has been quick to offer tentative certitude.
My mind and heart are filled with a vast library of cultural fiction, put there to placate a deep desire to know and understand. Rather than face and absorb the unknown, I have learned to live in a made-up reality. For instance, my world has been enveloped in a fog of religious beliefs that people have fashioned to explain what they were unable or not ready to understand.
Experience raised questions of unseen reality and creative imaginations filled in the voids with religious notions. In time, many of these notions have been recognized as blatantly fictional or false. But many others remain in the daily conversation of my culture.
I also breathed the atmosphere of racial bias that supports most cultures, including my own. When there was a lack of genuine experience and understanding about the “others”, the gap has been filled with made-up notions of what those “others” were like and what I could expect. Fictional veneers have been placed to reface differences that I experience, fictional veneers that serve to further keep us separate.
People create fictions of extra-terrestrials because of the unknowns surrounding phenomena they occasionally experience. In another age, there might have been fictional angels or demons luring behind the unknowns. Today, creatures from another planed are conjured up to explain what people have yet to fully understand. Something is experienced, and imagination rushes in to explain, or at least suggest, the unknown.
I notice an aspect of emptiness to most of my experiences. There is an unknown quality or feature to much of what I experience. Rather than be quick to explain away the unknown, I prefer to encourage my mind and heart to be at ease with things I do not yet know or understand.
Perhaps, in time I will have the insight to reach behind the obvious phenomena and touch a reality I had previously missed or mis-understood. Rather than live in a world of make-believe, I choose to embrace the unknown as readily as I embrace the known. My mind is more at rest, and I am more likely to be comfortable boldly walking in an atmosphere of ephemeral fog.
I want to live in a realm of infinite possibilities, as yet unknown.