Happy Halloween everyone! A great many people see today’s holiday as the day when they can dress up as someone or something else. It’s the day for costumes and makeup and creativity and fun. It’s a time of masks.
What people don’t think about is that the lives they’ve constructed for themselves is actually the costume. They put it on every day in order to fit in, to conform to expectations, to fulfill a role, to meet everyone else’s needs, or just to be who they are “supposed” to be. In part the spiritual life is meant to help us realize we are wearing a costume and to support us in living without out. Crazy and scary as that sounds, living as who we actually are is freeing even if we don’t know exactly what that is. Part of life is the adventure, discovering who we might be, who we could be, and who we certainly are not.
Halloween is an amazing holiday because it allows us to take off the costume we live in and explore other aspects of ourselves. We might be something sexy or charismatic, brave or smart, a hero or a villain, or something silly that allows us to laugh freely, which something we don’t allow much if at all in our regular lives.
So today of all days, whether you’re dressing up, taking the kids out for fun and games, going out to a party, staying in, or just relaxing with a scary movie or two, take this opportunity to take the costume off.
