embracing the unknown: how Halloween teaches us to dance with our fears
There's something profoundly paradoxical about Halloween. We dress as the things that terrify us, invite darkness into our homes through dimmed lights and flickering candles, and deliberately seek out experiences designed to make our hearts race. Yet on this night of manufactured terror, something magical happens: we laugh. We shriek with delight. We feel more alive than we have in months.
Halloween, beneath its costume and candy exterior, offers us a masterclass in confronting the unknown—and perhaps more importantly, in finding joy despite uncertainty.
The Theater of Fear
Most of us live anxious and worried lives. And the sad part is that we hardly ever live in the present. When we carve grotesque faces into pumpkins or hang skeletons from our porches during Halloween, we're engaging in an ancient human ritual: externalizing our fears. We step away from worrying incessantly about our future and setting up our own little haunted houses in our minds with different kinds of ghosts, and instead reconnect with the “real world.”
The unknown—that vast, shapeless anxiety about what tomorrow might bring—becomes a ghost with a bedsheet, a vampire with plastic fangs, a skeleton that we can literally hold in our hands. By giving form to the formless, we transform overwhelming dread into something we can see, touch, and ultimately control.
This is no small psychological feat. Our brains are wired to fear uncertainty more than known threats. Studies show that people often prefer receiving a guaranteed electric shock over having a 50% chance of being shocked, simply because the waiting and not-knowing creates more anxiety than the pain itself. Halloween invites us to flip this script—to voluntarily enter the haunted house, to deliberately court the jump scare, to choose the unknown.
The Permission to Play
What makes Halloween's approach to fear so effective is its fundamental unseriousness. Yes, the decorations depict death and danger, but they're absurd. The Grim Reaper is inflatable. The werewolf is your neighbor Bob. This playful approach to terror offers a crucial insight: when we stop taking our fears so seriously, when we allow ourselves to see them as temporarily adopted costumes rather than permanent truths, they lose much of their power.
Children understand this intuitively. Watch a four-year-old trick-or-treating as a monster—they're simultaneously the creature and themselves, frightening and frightened, powerful and vulnerable. They exist fully in the present moment, not worried about whether houses three doors down will have good candy, not rehashing the disappointing fun-size Smarties from two houses ago. They are here, now, in costume, in the dark, alive to every sensation.
Living in the Here and Now
This is Halloween's greatest gift: it demands presence. You cannot fully experience a haunted house while mentally rehearsing tomorrow's presentation. You cannot savor the creativity of costumes while ruminating about past mistakes. The sensory richness of the holiday—the crunch of leaves underfoot, the smell of pumpkin guts, the taste of candy corn (however controversial), the sound of distant laughter mixing with eerie music—anchors us firmly in the now.
The unknown becomes less threatening when we're not projecting ourselves into it. Halloween teaches us that we can be uncertain about what's around the corner, in the dark, or waiting in our future—and still move forward. Still ring the doorbell. Still explore the shadows. The act of continuing despite uncertainty, of choosing engagement over paralysis, is perhaps the most valuable form of courage.
The Temporary Nature of Everything
There's also something oddly comforting about Halloween's impermanence. The decorations go up for a few weeks and come down. The costume is worn for one night. The fear in the haunted house lasts for twenty minutes. This built-in transience reminds us that all emotional states—including fear and uncertainty—are temporary. The unknown doesn't remain unknown forever. Eventually, you exit the maze, the lights come on, and the actors break character to make sure you're okay.
Life's uncertainties work the same way, though we often forget this. The job you're worried about getting? Eventually you'll know. The relationship you're anxious about? It will either work out or it won't, and then you'll know. The unknown's greatest trick is making us believe it will last forever, when in fact the only permanent thing is that everything eventually becomes known.
Integration, Not Elimination
Halloween doesn't promise to eliminate fear—quite the opposite. It invites us to include fear as part of a fuller experience of life. The holiday suggests that a life well-lived isn't one without shadows, but one where we've learned to walk confidently through the dark, knowing that the unknown contains not just potential dangers but potential delights.
As the jack-o'-lanterns flicker out and November arrives with its own uncertainties, we might carry forward Halloween's essential wisdom: that we can acknowledge our fears without being ruled by them, that playfulness is a form of courage, and that the present moment—this moment, right now, whatever it contains—is the only place where we can actually live. The unknown will always be with us. Halloween teaches us we might as well enjoy the ride.
