It’s the end of January in my town which means one thing: there's still that one house that hasn’t taken its Christmas lights down yet. Luckily for me, this year that house is the one right outside my bedroom window. And, following this extremely obvious train of logic, these leftover lights have me thinking of two things: aliens and God. Why? Well, because when you wake up in the middle of the night and your bedroom is slightly lit by purple and red lights, you obviously think you’re either about to be abducted by extraterrestrials or raptured by angels. Obviously. I’m not going to touch the God part (sorry haters), but I am coming out as an alien-believer. Whenever people ask me why, I tell them that the universe is just too big to not have other living things in them. I mean scientists have already come up with equations that prove the probable existence of aliens. However, that's not the root of it all, and I don’t exactly care about math all that much. The simple fact of the matter is I believe in aliens. Despite the proof that they do or don’t exist, I do. People believe in things all the time, that things will get better, that things will get worse, and neither of them are entirely wrong. People believe that a stranger on the internet knows them personally or that he’s never gonna cheat on you again because he promised too (replace this with: the person who just glanced at them in class is in love with them), maybe those two people are actually wrong. I don’t know. That’s what's really being chewing me up, believing.
To slightly contradict myself, about 95% of the time knowing the truth and reality is important. For the majority of your life, belief isn’t some big leap from point A to happiness, it’s a daily prayer and a warm feeling. I’m not arguing for us to completely abandon reality for degrees of delusion. However, the other 5% still does exist. There’s a point where you reach the horizon and you have the option to look over the edge or not. If you do, you fall down into everything, suffocating under the facts that atoms are particles are quarks are whatever or whatever and you get lost in the technicality. Your 5-year-old self cries because they realize reindeer can’t fly nor can they eat carrots and there’s no way a whole man can fit down your electric chimney. The other option is to not look down, to close your eyes and confidently step forward: to believe. Younger you knows it doesn’t matter if Santa is real or not because the presents are going to pretend to have his name anyway, and it’s much more fun to pretend. You realize that whatever’s below quarks doesn’t matter because you hit a growth spurt very young and don’t have to worry about anything that small (RIP Short Kings - delete this whole sentence probably).
When you get down to it, we really cannot prove anything. That’s a sentence with a load of nihilistic 14-year-old energy, but stay with me for a moment. We prove everything based on our senses. They tell us what’s going on by sending signals to our brain. Our brain is made of millions of chemicals telling us they are a brain and we believe them. We believe them when they tell us we are chemicals and so we right that down. Not to say that science isn’t true, it most definitely is, but this is how logic breaks down. You tear any belief down to its core and you end up back at the top again. There’s a symbol called the Ouroboros which is a snake eating its own tail, going around and around, a symbol for infinity. That’s the way I imagine believing, you strip a belief back to its basics and circle back around to the whole. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, it’s just the way I comprehend it. We believe tomorrow could be better because yesterday we did the same thing, and there’s another day coming tomorrow. The thing below quarks is just the tail staring us in the face, asking for another bite. I believe in aliens because I like the thought of it. I like the thought of it because it makes my life more entertaining. I got that idea from some movie about aliens. The person that made that movie probably thought aliens were entertaining too. Around and around and around.
In the end, I don’t believe in aliens because I have any proof, and I don’t need any. The point of it all is that my belief doesn’t affect anyone. It doesn't change anything pretty much, except for one thing: when I wake up in the middle of the night I get to imagine that something exciting is happening. I get over it just as fast, but I still get to smile because, for just a moment, I got to believe in something fun.
