Hold on to your innocence

We’re not doing a good job of protecting innocence. I didn’t realize how important it was until I lost my innocence. I think we all have different barriers of forbidden ground, those lines in the sand that we shouldn’t cross that we do. If we cross a severe line we lose something precious. And often times you don’t know you’ve lost your innocence until it’s gone.

There are some relationships that I’d take back, some actions I wouldn’t do if I knew what I know now. The act of living life becomes hard when your innocence is gone.

You find yourself like Adam and Eve working the soil in toil because they ate of the forbidden fruit. I never completely understood that story, why God would allow temptation to exist in the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. I always wondered why God would tease them that way. Was that temptation necessary?

But I realize how true to life that story is in the midst of having what was pure, sacred and vulnerable about me stripped away. In that regard I sensed my spiritual nakedness. And I wonder, how do you repair innocence lost?

Last time I wrote I wrote about my mom and how I wish I could remember more things about her. I concluded, when it came down to it, the things that I remembered about her were special and that I needed to focus on the things that I do remember instead of focusing on what I don’t remember.

Now I know what it was that was so special about her. Now that I’ve reflected on her memory more, I realize that she had a purity, an innocence that I used to think was hokey or cheesy but actually it was beautiful and life-giving.

She loved the song “High Hopes” and tried her best to make sure that she and my father never argued in front of us. I could see she wanted to protect my brother and me.

She wanted to shield us from the dangers of this world. I hate to say that that’s impossible. But it’s hard to live a sheltered life, lose your innocence and still make sense of the world. In that bubble of innocence the world is a place of hope and love; outside of it the world is dark and tragic. When innocence is lost it’s a constant fight to stay on the path of the weary, to keep telling yourself that there is beauty in this ugly world.

It’s a challenge to find personal sanity in the midst of the craziness that you read in the paper and see on the news. Threats of nuclear war may have been heard before but drudgery doesn’t make those possible threats less daunting. What am I saying?

I’m saying that the world is beautiful, it is a place of hope, but it’s so much harder to see it that way when your innocence is gone. I may fight all my life to see the beauty in the world that I took for granted seeing when I was younger and full of hope.

I thought this loss of hope might have come from aging but there are those who age younger and more vibrantly than others. How do they achieve that feat? Maybe they’ve held on to their sugar, their sweetness, their innocence. When you let go of it it’s a fight to reproduce the feeling of wonderment and cheer that exist with it. Disillusionment tends to set in and you find yourself wondering, “Is this it?”

I guess that’s why children are special. They remind us of a world more pure and lovely. Even as you read this I challenge you to see the world with childlike glasses. And even if yours is gone, whatever you have to do, fight to preserve a child’s innocence. That has gotten harder and harder these days.

Chandler Collins is a staff writer for The Southeast Sun and Daleville Sun-Courier. The opinions of this writer are his own and not the opinion of the paper. He can be reached at (334) 393-2969 or by email at [email protected].