Facing the Darkness: A Choice

My earliest memory is of standing at the bottom of a stairway, looking up into the darkness.  I remember the feeling of wonder, but also of fear. I was only three years old.

This was at my grandmother's house way out in the country.  My mom and sisters and I were visiting her and our uncle who lived there. This was the house my mom grew up in, with eight kids in all besides her parents. The upstairs weren’t used in years after the kids left. 

📸 by qimono on pixabay

So there I was standing at the bottom of the stairway with the doorway open, my grandmother teased me about going up into the dark. She warned of spiders and scorpions. What else would be in the dark? What did I even know about at such a young age? Were there spiders and scorpions? Possibly. Were there ghosts? Maybe. Grandmother did not want me up there (it’s likely she just didn’t want me snooping around!). I guess putting fear in me was as good a way as any to keep me from going up there. 

I remember, as I said earlier, the feeling of wonder - deep inside we want to explore, look, discover, experience places we’ve never been. This desire stays with us throughout our lives. Then there was also the feeling of fear - what is unknown, unfamiliar, scares us into ideas, images and thoughts of things that are or could be harmful, painful, life-threatening. Our minds also carry this fear with us through life.

A battle - of wonder and of fear - which one wins? These feelings develop early of course, and each person creates their paths. We either choose to stand up to all the fears and warnings and move forward in exploration, or choose to give in to whatever we conjured up as negative outcomes and thus close the door.

Looking up into the darkness, being so young, hearing the heeding of my grandmother, I chose to walk away from the stairs. I did not go up there. Everyone laughed, they all thought it was funny. Was that failure I felt, humiliation? I couldn’t identify it then. Looking back I can only assume I felt some kind of defeat.

But that’s life. Whether at three years old or at any age, the choice is there - to discover the wonder of life before us, or to cower in fear because of what-ifs. Not that fear is always cowardly, sometimes fear is wise and works. Everybody has to figure it out for themselves.

Only a few years later, about nine or ten years old, I did sneak up there! My sisters did too. We were nosy. There never was electricity upstairs, but through the windows we had enough light to rummage through the old belongings left behind. I wish I would have appreciated those things back then. I felt fascinated to find an old-time typewriter and phone, but disappointed in notebooks - silly me - those should have been kept as they could have been journals, descriptions of time gone by. 

📸 by siala on pixabay

At any rate, the fear was gone, except for the dark corners up there, where the daylight could not reach. I still dared not tread there. I was warned that the wooden floors were weak and could break. So I never completed my “tour” of the forbidden floors.

Wonder never ceases. Neither does fear. They both got us this far. Now which way?

Theresa M