The LAW Way

*Spoiler Alert.*

This essay was born from a movie, but it is not meant to explain it. Inevitably, however, it reflects on parts of its ending. If you haven’t seen it yet and would rather experience it without any prior references, this may be a good moment to save this reading for later.

---

Some movies end when the credits roll. Others barely begin when you leave the theater.

For me, this one began hours later, at an airport, running on only a few hours of sleep, waiting for a connecting flight in Detroit while my mind kept doing what it loves most: connecting dots, cross-referring data.

I have always loved that part of myself.

My mind feels like a library where every book remains open at the same time. A fossil is having a conversation with a scientific theory. A movie is talking to a personal experience. Norse mythology is sitting next to a conspiracy theory. A conversation with my partner is somehow connected to a tattoo I happen to notice on a waitress a few hours later.

I never try to stop those conversations. On the contrary. I enjoy watching them unfold.

And while I waited for my flight to Miami, I realized I wasn’t really thinking about a movie anymore. I was thinking about the way human beings create meaning.

Let me make something clear from the beginning. I am not writing about what the movie means. I am writing about what it moved in me. And precisely because one of the reflections it left me with was about perception, I deeply respect that someone else may have walked out of the theater with a completely different interpretation. Two people can watch the exact same images and walk away having lived completely different experiences. Not because one is right and the other is wrong. But because every consciousness engages with the world through a unique and unrepeatable story.

As I continued processing the movie, an idea surfaced that hasn’t left me since.

Humanity’s fundamental questions are eternal. Who are we? Are we alone? Is there something beyond what we can perceive? Is there a higher intelligence? Are there truths we have yet to discover? These questions have accompanied us since the beginning.

What changes are not the questions. What changes are the symbols we use to answer them.

The ancient Greeks imagined Zeus hurling lightning. The Norse imagined Ragnarök. The Middle Ages imagined alchemists, angels, and demons. Our era imagines simulations, hidden governments, conspiracy theories and galactic federations.

I am not writing this to affirm or deny any of those narratives. In fact, I believe that maybe one of the most common mistakes of our time is assuming that only two positions are possible: blind belief or automatic dismissal. I have never felt completely comfortable in either extreme. I have always loved learning. And I think that is the identity that defines me most deeply.

I am a learner.

I don’t feel the need to choose a single story and defend it to the end. I would rather listen to many stories and observe how they converse with one another. I am interested in science. I am interested in philosophy. I am interested in religion. I am interested in history. I am fascinated by ancient mythologies. And I am equally fascinated by conspiracy theories. Not because I necessarily consider them factually true, but because I consider them profoundly valuable as cultural expressions.

People often ask me what I believe about certain subjects. And I always find that question difficult to answer. Not because I lack convictions, but because my way of learning has never consisted of replacing one idea with another. My mind functions more like a round table than a courtroom. Different perspectives remain seated together, engaged in conversation. They do not arrive to defeat one another. Some evolve. Some grow stronger. Some disappear. But never through imposition. Only through evolution.

Every myth tells us something about the civilization that created it. Every story reveals a collective fear, a hope, or a longing. In that sense, narratives about extraterrestrials seem to me to be among the great myths of our time.

That does not mean denying the possibility of intelligent life elsewhere in the universe. Doing so would be absurd in a cosmos whose immensity we are only beginning to understand. To speak of a narrative as myth is not to pronounce judgment on its factual truth. It is to recognize its symbolic power. Myths do not survive for centuries by accident. They survive because they speak to something profoundly human. I believe myths are not important because they can be proven. They are important because they organize the way a civilization understands itself.

And then I arrive at the final word of the movie.

“Listen.”

Many viewers left frustrated because they never received the message they expected. I left thinking that perhaps the message was never the content. Listen. It sounded to me like a spiritual instruction. Or perhaps an invitation. But every invitation carries an unspoken question.

Are you willing to listen? Not to believe. Not to accept. Not to abandon critical thinking. Simply to listen. To listen to ideas that challenge your own, to listen to what you do not yet understand. to listen to what science has not yet answered, to listen to what mythology has been trying to express for thousands of years through different symbols, to listen even to the possibility that your understanding of reality will always be incomplete, that you do not know everything.

Perhaps that is why I have never been interested in collecting certainties.

I prefer collecting perspectives.

I don’t feel the need to erase one idea when another arrives. I let them coexist, I let them interact, I watch them transform one another. As I said before, over time some change places. Some acquire entirely new meanings. Others remain, not because I defended them, but because they continue to dialogue with my experience.

Perhaps that is why I love mythology so much. Not because I need to believe in it. But because it helps me understand the people who created it. And perhaps that is also why I find myself so fascinated by extraterrestrials, galactic battles, and every great contemporary narrative. Because before I see answers, I see questions.

And as long as humanity continues asking the same timeless questions through new symbols, I will remain endlessly fascinated by that journey.

I don’t know whether we will ever answer the great questions that have accompanied our species since the beginning. Perhaps that was never the point. Perhaps what truly matters is never losing the ability to ask them. To keep listening, to keep learning. To keep allowing ideas to converse with one another. Because knowledge is not a destination to be reached, it is a landscape to be explored. And those of us who love learning rarely complain that the horizon keeps moving. We smile. Because we know it means there is still so much left to discover.

Perhaps we will never know whether extraterrestrials exist or whether the stories we build around them are the founding myths of our age. Perhaps both possibilities can coexist while we continue learning. But after leaving the theater, I was left with a question far more important than any extraterrestrial revelation.

If the final word of the movie was “Listen,” then maybe the real question is not what they were trying to tell us.

The real question is:

Are we truly willing to listen?

Lissie