Late Night Fiction Seriously, open at 10pm

Magic

We humans seem to like magic. The unknown. Mysteries. Santa, the tooth fairy; as a child we don't know where the presents they bring come from, but we sure as anything enjoy getting them. And when the day comes where you find out Santa isn't real, Christmas becomes a monotonous present-receiving event. There's no cookies to leave out for mom and dad because, well, they aren't the Santa you had always pictured as a child. Not only that, but you lose the urge to stay up as late as you could to find out just who Santa was. The unknowing is gone, so what's the point of even holding an interest in it?

I realized this a lot today. After my car overheated and my mechanic told me it was my thermostat, I went online to see what exactly this thermostat does for my car and why it might've broke. I read about how it all functions and that if I got one of these little thermostat deals, I could put it in boiling water, and after it warmed up it would just open-- without any apparent cause. I thought that was pretty damn neat, and it made me want to go out and get one so I could test it out for myself! But I read on, and learned that there was simply wax in a cylinder on this thermostat that melts at a certain temperature, expands, and in turn opens up the little valve. A moment later, I had no strong will to go get one to experiment with. It took all the mystery out of it. Although my natural human thirst for knowledge was quenched, I didn't get to figure it out for myself. I didn't get to investigate, or even have it remain a mystery in my head until the time when I could finally test it out on my own.

Knowledge seems to be a double-edged sword. If you lived your whole life believing in God and then were presented the evidence that fully persuaded you he didn't exist, you would have preferred not to have heard it. You'd rather live in a world where, even if you didn't believe in him, there was always a slight chance; a glimmer of hope.

What I'm getting at is that sometimes, in this world that we live in, we need a little ignorance. We need some mystery because it's easier to accept that there's an invisible supreme-being high in the sky than it is to accept the fact that we don't know the origin of our own existence.

However, I think that if we humans have the mental capacity to wonder about our own existence, and have the innate desire to figure and learn on our own, then we have the mental capacity to find an answer to anything in this world. And if we could actually unlock the power in our brains, the other 90% we don't use, we could accomplish those things. But I feel if we didn't have to put so much energy into living in an always-on, money-ruled, stress- and worry-filled society, we'd have that much more power to devote to actually unlocking our God-given (for lack of better words) mental abilities. And who knows, maybe then we wouldn't need a Santa.