Innocence & Worldliness

Chatting with Amity on Skype this morning:

We're talking about children, and why people have them. And at what point in our lives to have them; when, like us, we are privileged enough to be able to choose. (Thank you Margaret Sanger). I think that as adults, we choose to have children to help bring us back from too much worldliness. We all start out as innocent, but the years and the stimulus piles up. Children bring us back to that sense of balance, so we can be balanced adults.

And I'm starting to understand how devastating it is to lose one's innocence. We don't mourn it in ourselves because we are too determined to grow up. Plus, we have no idea at the time (usually) that we are even losing it, or that there is even an extraordinary value to innocence. But I think it's somewhat crushing to watch the loss of this in a child, from the point of view of adulthood. The infant we held in their first breaths and moments, now buffeted by all those things that shape us and never leave us the same again.

This got us thinking of also of creativity, in addition to procreativity. Amity said that she thinks the experience of doing my MFA totally burned me out to the creative side of myself. This is the side she knew of me in college, the side that caused me to burn brightly and see the world, dare I say, with a bit of innocence. Iowa, and now Chicago, are the worldliness in me. I can never erase these experiences, but I'm seeing where I can come back around again.

I need to find those lenses that will allow to come into focus the new years of worldliness with a little of the freshness and energy I had before them. It's not about having children, however. Not yet. But I suspect that I need to reorient myself to the innocence in me before I'm truly able to come around to nurturing and protecting the innocence in others.