How Belief Shapes You When You're Not Looking

I've been thinking a lot about belief lately. Not in the abstract, philosophical sense – though there's been plenty of that too – but in the immediate, visceral way that beliefs shape your daily existence when you're actually paying attention to them. Which, to be fair, I haven't always been doing.

A week ago, I was in a different headspace entirely. Not worse, necessarily, just... different. Less certain about things I now feel quite certain about. And somewhere between then and now, whilst I wasn't looking, my beliefs shifted from background noise to foreground presence. They stopped being things I thought about occasionally and became things that actively shape how I move through the world.

This is going to sound dramatic, but I think I've spent most of my life treating belief like optional software – something you could install or uninstall depending on whether it was useful at the time. Growing up amongst non-practising Catholics and atheists will do that to you. Religion was something other people had, something that happened in buildings on Sundays, something essentially decorative. I was an atheist by default, not by conviction. It just seemed like the sensible position when nobody around you was making a particularly compelling case for the alternative.

And then, gradually, things changed. I'm not going to pretend there was a damascene moment – no burning bush, no voice from the heavens, no sudden certainty that rearranged my entire worldview in an instant. It was slower than that. More like... noticing that certain things resonated in ways I couldn't quite explain. Paying attention to patterns. Feeling drawn to practices that didn't fit neatly into the materialist framework I'd been operating under.

The Thing About Finding Your Path

I've been calling myself a Spiritual But Not Religious Greco-Celtic syncretic Pagan for a few months now. Which is a mouthful, admittedly, but it's the most accurate description I've got. Greek and Celtic traditions in equal measure, honouring deities from both pantheons, trying to find a practice that feels authentic rather than adopted wholesale from someone else's tradition.

The Greek side centres on Selene, the Titaness of the moon. I was born on a Monday – the moon's day – and that connection feels significant in ways I can't entirely articulate. It's not that I think Selene personally arranged my birth date (though who knows, honestly), but rather that paying attention to that correspondence opened up something. Made me notice the moon's cycles in a way I hadn't before. Made me think about light and darkness, about constancy and change, about things that are always present even when you can't see them.

I've been tracking the lunar phases for a few years now, actually. Started doing it casually, just out of curiosity, before I had any particular spiritual framework for it. But the tracking became more meaningful once I had a reason beyond astronomical interest. Once I started thinking about the moon not just as a celestial body but as something worth honouring. Someone worth honouring, maybe. The data I'd been collecting suddenly had context, purpose, significance beyond "oh, interesting, it's full again."

The Celtic side is trickier to pin down, partly because I'm working with fragments and reconstructions rather than an unbroken tradition. But the symbolism speaks to me – the triskelion with its endless spirals, the significance of the Yew tree (my name, Ewan, from Eòghann, means "born of Yew"), the emphasis on cycles and thresholds and the thin places between worlds. I grew up 3:1 English-Scottish, and whilst I'm firmly in England and have no romantic illusions about ancestral homelands, there's something in the Celtic framework that feels like coming home to a place I've never actually been.

Syncretic feels like the right word because I'm not trying to keep these traditions separate. I'm not doing Greek paganism on Mondays and Celtic paganism on Thursdays. They inform each other. They overlap. Sometimes in ways that are theologically questionable, probably, but theology has never been my strong suit. What matters is that it works – that the practice feels alive rather than performative.

When Belief Becomes Real

Here's the thing that's changed this past week: belief stopped being theoretical.

For months, I've been building this practice. Reading, researching, trying to understand the traditions I'm drawing from. Setting up small rituals. Thinking about what it means to honour deities, what offerings are appropriate, how to structure devotional practice when you're working without a community or established guidelines. And all of that was... fine. Interesting, even. But it still felt somewhat external, like I was playing at being a pagan rather than actually being one.

And then something shifted. I can't point to the exact moment, but somewhere in the past week, the practice stopped feeling like something I was trying on and started feeling like something I was doing. Not performing, not experimenting – just doing, the way you do things that are part of your actual life rather than things you're considering adding to your life.

Part of it was making an offering to Selene. Which sounds simple, and in practical terms it was – just tea, left out under the moon with intention and respect. But I'd been paralysed about it for weeks. What if I did it wrong? What if the offering was inappropriate? What if I was being disrespectful by offering something so mundane? I got myself into a proper spiral about it, analysing every possible way I could mess it up, until finally I just... did it anyway.

And nothing terrible happened. The moon didn't explode. Selene didn't smite me for my presumption. I just left tea under the moon, and it felt right, and that was enough.

That sounds absurdly simple written down, but it was significant. Because it meant I'd stopped treating my beliefs as something that needed to be perfect before they could be real. I'd accepted that fumbling attempts at connection are more meaningful than perfect silence. That intention matters more than execution. That the gods – if they're paying attention at all, which I choose to believe they are – probably aren't judging me for getting the details wrong.

The Practical Impact of Belief

The thing about actually believing something, rather than just intellectually agreeing with it, is that it changes your behaviour. Not in dramatic, life-overturning ways necessarily, but in small, persistent adjustments that accumulate over time.

I've been paying attention to the moon for years, tracking its phases, noting the patterns. But now it means something different. Monday feels different when you're conscious that it's the moon's day. Lunar cycles start mattering when you're honouring a lunar deity. The waning gibbous isn't just a phase I note in my tracking – it's a moment in a cycle that has spiritual significance, a time for release and reflection before the darkness of the new moon.

I think about cycles more generally. Birth, growth, death, rebirth – the endless turning of the triskelion. Nothing is permanent, but nothing is truly lost either. Everything transforms. I've always intellectually understood this (I did pay attention in biology, despite what my teachers might have claimed), but believing it spiritually is different from knowing it scientifically. It changes how you hold things. Makes you less desperate to cling, because you trust that what needs to return will return in some form.

I've become more conscious of thresholds and liminal spaces. Doorways. Dusk and dawn. The moments between sleeping and waking. The Celts were big on thin places – locations where the boundary between worlds is permeable – and whilst I can't claim to have found any actual thin places in suburban England, I can pay attention to the thin times. The moments when things shift. When one state becomes another.

And perhaps most significantly, I've started thinking seriously about death. Which is ironic, given that I have thanatophobia – fear of death – along with a delightful collection of other death-adjacent phobias (athazagoraphobia, the fear of being forgotten, and pyrophobia, fear of fire, just for good measure). But believing in reincarnation, in returning to Gaia and being transformed rather than simply ceasing, has made death feel less like an ending and more like... well, a threshold. Another liminal space. Still frightening, obviously – I'm not suddenly cured of lifelong phobias by discovering paganism – but frightening in a different way. Less "void of nothingness" and more "transformation I'm not ready for yet."

The Weight of Practice

I won't pretend this has all been easy or comfortable. Belief comes with responsibilities. Once you've decided that something is real and meaningful, you can't just ignore it when it's inconvenient. Well, you can, technically, but then you're not really believing, are you? You're just playing at it.

So I've been trying to maintain practice even when I don't feel like it. Small things, mostly – acknowledging Selene when I see the moon, leaving offerings, thinking about what I'm asking for and what I'm giving in return. Trying to be consistent without being rigid. Trying to build something sustainable rather than burning myself out with overly ambitious devotional schedules I'll inevitably abandon.

It's harder than it sounds. Especially when you're doing this solo, without a community or tradition to provide structure and accountability. There's nobody checking whether I've maintained my practice, nobody to notice if I skip things, nobody to tell me I'm doing it wrong (or right, for that matter). It's just me, my beliefs, and my constant internal monologue questioning whether any of this is real or whether I'm just making elaborate stories to cope with existential anxiety.

Which, to be honest, might be what I'm doing. I can't prove otherwise. But increasingly, I'm okay with that uncertainty. Because even if belief is just elaborate storytelling, it's storytelling that makes my life feel more meaningful. It gives me frameworks for understanding experience. It connects me to traditions and practices that predate me by millennia. It makes me pay attention to things I'd otherwise overlook – the moon, the cycles, the thresholds, the moments of transformation.

The tracking I've been doing for years suddenly has layers now. It's not just data. It's devotion. It's paying attention to something I've decided matters, something I've chosen to honour. The same action, but weighted differently. More intentional. Less about curiosity and more about reverence.

Where This Leaves Me

A week ago, I was still figuring out whether this pagan thing was something I was actually doing or just something I was thinking about doing. And now, somehow, the question has resolved itself. Not because I made a decision, exactly, but because the decision made itself through accumulated practice. Through showing up, even when I wasn't sure what I was doing. Through making offerings even when I was terrified of getting them wrong. Through treating my beliefs as real enough to act on, rather than theoretical positions to be endlessly analysed.

I'm still figuring out what this looks like long-term. What it means to be a pagan in 2025, in England, working largely from reconstructed practices and personal gnosis because I don't have access to unbroken traditions. What it means to honour deities from two different cultural contexts simultaneously. What it means to build a practice that's authentically mine rather than adopted wholesale from someone else's path.

But I'm less paralysed by the questions now. Less convinced that I need to have everything figured out before I can act. More willing to accept that belief is something you do, not something you perfect in theory before implementing in practice.

The yew has been watered, as it were. Imperfectly, inconsistently, with shaking hands and persistent uncertainty about whether I'm doing it right. But watered nonetheless. And maybe that's enough. Maybe the point isn't perfection but persistence. Maybe the gods, if they're paying attention, value honest fumbling over perfect silence.

I don't know where this goes from here. I don't know if I'll still be practising in a year, or five years, or whether this is just another phase in a long series of spiritual experiments. But right now, in this moment, it feels real. It feels like mine. It feels like something worth doing.

And that's more than I had a week ago.