By Lila Wright
Edited by Hillary Qi and Alloe Mak

I experienced two major blows to my belief systems in my early life. 

The first was when I found out Santa Claus wasn’t real. I had suspected it for years but waited to ask for confirmation until my mother was down with an ear infection and the flu. I knew she wouldn’t have the strength to lie, and she didn’t. I cried for hours. 

The second came when my neighbour’s house burned down. The fire caught early in the morning and their home was razed to the ground before noon. Everyone survived the fire, but their life had irreparably changed. That family moved out of our small town shortly after, and I’m not sure where they ended up. 

Neither of these instances involved the death of a person, but rather the death of a certain conception of the world—the death of an idea. 

The first instance preyed on my capacity to believe in things I wasn’t certain were true. Or, better put, my sense of unrestrained wonder. 

The second stole my sense of invulnerability and left me expecting the unexpected in the worst sense of the phrase. 

These experiences, while unique in circumstance, are not unique in substance. At some point in the process of growing up, everyone loses their raw childlike wonderment and sacrifices their invulnerability to the unfortunate realities of unpredictability. 

The question is, then: What rattles around in the empty spaces left behind? How do we fill these holes? 

Here’s what I propose: 

In place of wonder comes a renouncement of naïveté. Seriousness becomes central to the adult identity and weaves itself tightly with intelligence. The two become hideous twins— too entwined to perceive one without the other and too tightly bound to let imagination slip between the cracks. From this, we get the ugly fetishization of the pessimist. The belief that value is only found in harsh relatives and stone-cold truths. 

In place of invulnerability, we get fear, doubt, and dread. There is an understanding that simply hoping for something won’t make it come true. It goes by many names. The role of doubt in adult life doesn’t need much explanation—it uproots our stability and injects uncertainty into any emerging grand plan or small intention. 

Ironically, my neighbours oriented their life around the dogmatic rejection of doubt—faith. As such, they had neglected to adequately insure their home, choosing instead to believe in God’s plan to keep them on their feet. This knowledge is part of what made watching their displacement so horrible and so impactful. They had believed so strongly in something that they had failed to account for any other possibility. They had lost everything to something they never thought would happen. 

On the other hand, it’s possible their belief was unaffected by the tragedy. Perhaps it allowed them to strengthen their resolve and steel themselves against the reality of their situation. Maybe they found comfort in their perceived inevitability of the grand plan. Unfortunately, I don’t know this part of their story. I can only hope. 

I’m not religious myself, but I’ll use their tragic metaphor to make my point: 

If we hope not to get stuck in the empty spaces left behind, we must cultivate the space. Find strange ways to use the emptiness to strengthen our hope, our optimism, and our belief in beauty. We all host gaps and voids in our fundamental goodness. I hear echoes of fear and doubt and dread and unrest in the spaces once innocently occupied by childlike wonder. 

What I ask myself, and what I’m now asking of others, is to question why the space needs to remain empty. Why should we leave space for rattles and echos? Why, when we could ask ourselves: What could grow here, instead?