What I Could Not See

Looking back on it now, it seems that I had things rather easy when I was much younger than I am now. Of course, when I was that young, I didn't really appreciate the fact. I did have fun. Certainly I enjoyed myself, but I took so much of it for granted. Perhaps part of what made it so enjoyable was that I did take it for granted, that I didn't realize how special that time was. Oftentimes, when I do realize how special something really is while it is happening, it adds pressure that can take away from that wonderful carefree joy of the moment. All this is not to say that I didn't have worries then. I did. Those fears were just as real to me then as my present ones can be to me now. If on looking back on them they seem small or silly, perchance they seem so only because I have by now conquered them.

One of my deepest fears back then was of the dark. It truly terrified me. In the dark, the sense that I had learned to depend on the most to guide me and let me know when things were safe was taken away from me. How would I know if there were goblins or demons or monsters or something else possibly even more terrible there in the dark? They could be hiding there and I might not even know it until they reached out and grabbed me and it was too late! My mind was filled with all the terrible things that could be just behind the corner or hiding under my bed.

I remember the fright within me when bedtime came and I would have to travel all the way from my doorway to my bed in the dark. I would take the precaution of looking all around my room before I snapped off my light and ran and leapt to my bed. Then I would lie there clutching my favorite stuffed toy in my arms waiting for morning to come. My mind was a whirlwind of foreboding visions, as I shivered under my covers. I would whisper a prayer that I might make it safely through the night, and my eyelids began to droop in sleep. Somehow I always woke up the next morning to find myself safe and whole in my own bed. The sunlight poured through my window, lighting the way to a new day.

I do not remember how long I was afraid and I feared the blankness of the night. I do though remember the one night it all changed. I was there in my bed with my imagination running wildly in the wrong direction and trying to calm myself. I had been told earlier that day how silly it was to be afraid of the dark and that things were really just the same as when the lights were on except you couldn't see them. "But how do you know? How do you know what is out there?" my mind screamed at me as I stared out into the nothing. Then for some reason, I don't remember why, my thoughts took a turn. Indeed, how did I know what was out there? If there could be monsters and villains and such, then couldn't there just as well be kind fairies and angels and other good things? That shadow of a goblin I thought I saw couldn't it just as well have been a fairy princess in disguise? I had no why of knowing, and if that was the case, the odds seemed to me to be just as good that it was a princess as for it being a goblin. So if half of them were good and half bad, then it would be rather even and I didn't really have anything to fear. Moreover, if I had no way of knowing, then it was really just up to me what I saw there. If that was the case, then I might as well just look for the good.

So that's what I did, and soon that very night all the shadows that had frightened me so before became wondrous with the possibility of some happy little elf or any number of fabulous things I could think to put there. Perhaps the darkness might still hide things, but what glories it could hide! It had become a place of beautiful magic and mystery. Maybe it's silly of me to think of the dark that way. Perhaps I shouldn't make up fairies to sit on my bookshelf at night. Yet if I have no way of really knowing what's there, I might as well go on believing it is something good.