Growing up I always felt spooky on Halloween. Going trick-or-treating, being out late at night amongst the backdrop of scary themes, it felt like there was some type of magic in the air. It seemed a little bit easier to envision a witch in a dilapidated house deep in a haunted forest, biding her time to come out to look for children.

It makes me smile, reminiscing about those simpler times.

Halloween has definitely blown up since then. Over the past 25 years, it seems the holiday has grown in mindshare and importance in our culture. Huge parties, all-out costumes, and themed decorations now dominate October.

I think it helps us embrace some magic in our world. I know everything has to be PC now, and there’s some pushback on the origins of the holiday and what it represents, whether it’s good for kids, etc etc, but I think it helps us court the unknown.

There are so many things we don’t know about our world, don’t understand about our universe. There are colors we can’t see, sound frequencies we can’t hear. Magnetism exists, and gravity, and nuclear forces. These things in our heads have this amazing computing power, we experience this thing called consciousness, and our bodies are made up of more than a trillion cells. We’ve barely explored our own ocean, have yet to reach the closest planet.

There’s so much we don’t know. Why disregard what could be possible, even the current impossible? We are babies to the void. Halloween channels the wonder, in a way. It encourages our imagination.

I know the spooky will creep its way in tonight as it gets dark. I hope we can all embrace the wonder and imagination tomorrow and beyond.