Finding Innocence
My 3-year old daughter knows two tenses - past and present. Anything that happened even a few hours ago is ‘kal’ (yesterday). She does not acknowledge the existence of the future. When I propose to do something later that evening, she says, ‘No, I want this today’. What she means is now. Children know what it is to live in the moment. That is probably why they indulge, laugh and cry as if there is no tomorrow. Their innocence feels refreshing.
I did not know what the word ‘innocent’ truly meant, so I looked it up. The old French root of the word is ‘nocere’ meaning injury (I could not come across the Hindi/Urdu etymology of ‘masoom’ or ‘nadaan’). The word in regular parlance means harmless, not guilty, pure, naive, ignorant — all alluding to being child-like. It is an adjective which most self-respecting adults would avoid being associated with, outside of its legal context. Naive and harmless is hardly how people like to describe themselves.
Not entirely convinced, I looked towards literature — quotes on what it means to be innocent. These quotes gave me something to think about:
“There’s nothing more contagious than the laughter of young children; it doesn’t even have to matter what they’re laughing about.”
“I never, even for a moment, doubted what they’d told me. This is why it is that adults and even parents can, unwittingly, be cruel; they cannot imagine doubt’s complete absence. They have forgotten.”
So I tried to put together a clunky definition which captures the essence of childhood innocence — it is the absence of doubt, where one is free from obligations and has timeless fun, with a lack of purpose.
I would like to believe that all of us have basked in this dawn of life, however short-lived. Life has been cruel towards many children, robbing them of this treasure sooner than others. There are reports on how children are losing their innocence at early ages as compared to their parents. It is as if we have made up our collective minds that losing innocence is an irreversible process.
And it certainly looks that way. Being an adult is all about being responsible, providing for others, being resilient under adversity, managing finances, laying out life plans. We cannot be children once grown and that is a fact (until the fragile, child-like last days of the circle of life).
But what if you could practice being in the moment (timelessness), or surrender to the fact that you and everyone you know, will eventually die and all you can do is to make most of this time (the ultimate absence of doubt), and that while you have responsibilities, the real weight on your shoulder is managing expectations, which can be toned down so you can breathe (being free from obligations, eventually)?
I know it does not come close to childhood innocence. But as Pablo Picasso puts it (in context of creativity I presume)- “It takes a very long time to become young.” So maybe, just maybe, if you give this a try, you may be able to laugh without a care again.
