It’s days until Halloween. Around our area there are so many homes decorated with witches and ghosts, pumpkins and devils. Cobwebs stretch from rooftops and across trees and one of our neighbors even has a set of shelves, five high, in the front yard that is filled with carved pumpkins, all lit and flickering after dark.

My granddaughter spent a lot of time this morning telling me about her costume for this year. In a switch from the last two years of Hermione Granger, she is going to be (did you already guess?) Taylor Swift. Even her freshly carved pumpkin boasts a heart shape, like the one Taylor makes with her hands (so I was told) along with the initials T.S.

It’s a fun thing to don a costume and pretend to be someone or something else for a few hours, and it’s even more fun to think about, and plan, the disguise that you will choose to wear.

Of course, we wear costumes every day. We may not be pulling elastics behind our ears to put masks on our faces, but we put on masks all the same. We wear our “work” face in a professional context. We wear expressions that we’ve learned to hide what we feel and think. We school our features into the appropriate alignment to reflect that which is appropriate at any given point in time, hiding, or at least trying to hide, our unedited reactions.

Granted, some of us, myself included, struggle to maintain a poker face. I try but my first reaction is often as clear in my expression as if it were written on my forehead with a Sharpie. And knowing that, I fight for the neutral look, the one that keeps what I really feel tucked away until, and if, I am ready to share it.

I wonder what life would be like if we all just openly shared our thoughts and feelings. Would the pent up anger and hostility that people act out be less? Would people ask more questions and be open to more truth? Would opening the floodgates neutralize and normalize emotions? I don’t know.

We are living at a time when so many of the costumes in our society are those of rage and hostility, uncontrolled anger and vicious lashing out. The tension is not an undercurrent but rather an electrical charge that is in the very air.

How do we find ways to be more honest and less volatile, to be more understanding and less violent, to be intolerant of brutality and open to kindness? How do we remember to try and live with a full heart?