I was enlightened when I was 16. We often repeat a popular sarcastic joke that goes something like, “kids know everything.” We say this because we were all kids and we have all found out just how much we didn’t know. When I say I was enlightened at 16, I don’t mean it in the sarcastic way. However, I also don’t mean it as a hyperbole as I certainly never reached nirvana and wouldn’t have made for much of a spiritual leader. Rather, I’m remarking on the enlightenment behind innocence – and I was a fairly innocent young man. One might say naive. One might.
Today I found myself setting an intention to try to enjoy and appreciate the good times rather than spoiling them by focusing on the next inevitable bad time. As I moved to set this intention, I felt an immediate resistance. Upon examination, the resistance seemed to be memories of times when the bad thing happened just as I allowed myself to enjoy the good thing. My intended intention lies on the other side of these remembered stories from my past. The 16 year old still inside of me has no problem expressing how important it is to let go of the pain and embrace the joy. The teenager within understands, better than the man I am today, the value of the finite time we have to live. That teenager, despite his enlightened heart, would have never conceived of just how tired and confused he would become. He expected the experience of life to lift him up into a deeper enlightenment rather than drag him away from it.
Knowledge and experience come with a price. Before I had experience, I had enlightenment. I understood many things intuitively that I can not see as clearly through the scars I have today. However, the experiences also provided me with knowledge. Even the naive teenager knew that life would not be easy, that there would be suffering and challenges. I knew that we are all here temporarily. But only the man I am today truly understands what it means to love and then lose a person. Only the man I am today understands what it is like to experience injustices, what it is like to know helplessness, or what it is like to realize the limits of my own perception of the world I am experiencing.
And here’s the rub. The knowledge we gain through experience gives us the tools to impact change. Only by understanding how things work can we effectively change something with intention. However, the cost of that understanding is losing touch with the intuitive knowingness of innocence. And without the knowingness, it is hard to know what changes to try to create to begin with. And like so much of life, it gets rather paradoxical.
So I wrote this. I wrote this as a place to store a small piece of knowledge and experience while I work on opening my heart to the now.
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