Tag: innocence

Sometimes I imagine myself sitting in a foreign country near the mountains on a brisk, sunny day, slowly watching the world go by me as I sit alone, thinking. Life swirls around me as I observe bits and pieces of conversations, interactions, and unknown people simply living their lives far away from my own. I experience a certain charm from this, seeing glimpses of daily life – small conversations between locals, young couples with nervous but encouraged smiles, walking together as they head to a local restaurant, faint music in the background… I ask myself why this image so often comes to mind. I think it’s both comforting and relatable to me – comforting in the sense that I am far away somewhere where the past bears no importance on the present. Relatable in the sense that it essentially paints a picture of how I often feel in the present, here in my home country.

This life can feel like a dream at times, something so easy yet hard to understand that you wonder what it truly means to exist at all. Despite our best analysis, so much of what we experience is unexplainable at a fundamental level. What does it mean to work? To love? To feel? To exist? As created beings, there was a time where we didn’t exist, making it all the more curious to exist now. Yet we seem to know (when we are generally healthy at least) that there is a fundamental beauty and purpose to life, though it can be easy to lose track of when times become hard.

Part of the strangeness of existence is the sort of mysterious experience which seem to defy time. The emotions evoked by great music, the way certain scents or sensations provoke distant memories and wistful nostalgia. Often these memories are simply elements of our imaginations that, though they never actually happened, stir something deep within us. These experiences are often what we would term “spiritual,” though as I have often felt, we don’t quite know how to define the word. Perhaps the “spiritual” nature to these experiences means that they are important as things which teach us something profound of the truth about ourselves. The stirring of our hearts teaches us what we truly want, what we truly desire, what we truly fear, and what we truly value at the end of the day. Even something as simple as a quiet daydream in a foreign town – what does it say about our hearts?

Another quality to the “spiritual” is that it seems to transcend time. This timelessness is part of why people often look to and act out their childhood when trying to discover the truths which operate at the foundation of their lives. Many draw the conclusion that childhood was a purer time – a conclusion which may certainly be true for many who find themselves corrupted in their later years. I think this is a hasty conclusion, however. It is not clear to me that life is an inevitably inescapable path to corruption. There is certainly a type of good news – a “gospel,” if you will – that brings mirth and joyful forgetfulness of the sorrows of our pasts.

Perhaps the wonder in being a kid is that everything happens to you for the first time – that first special song you hear resonates with you in a completely unique way, those first fireworks explode onto your imagination, that first beach trip opens your mind to a whole new world of exotic creatures, the soothing sound of waves, and salty tidepools teeming with life. Often, such experiences make you recall things which you’ve never experienced but seem to know and somehow understand. As you age, though you encounter fewer new experiences, a good dessert may still remind you of that first time you ever tried chocolate, and decorating the Christmas tree may stir gentle memories of sitting quietly watching the Christmas lights twinkle in the dark cold of a December night.

Is the recall of such memories a “spiritual” experience? Perhaps yes, in that there is a deep beauty to existence, and these simple but profound moments give us a glimpse of this profound beauty. As Claude Monet once said of those who pretended to understand his art: it is not necessary to understand, when it is simply necessary to love.

When we experience these simple moments of beauty, these memories and daydreams even, perhaps they are unexplainable because life is not meant to be fully understood, but rather, simply, loved.