Innocence

Few days back, I went out for dinner with my family. While we were waiting for our order, my brother started eating raw onions and seeing this, I became a little bit nostalgic. When I was a kid, whenever we went out for dinner and waited for our order, my dad would start eating raw onions in the similar fashion and I used to be so damn impressed by the act that I wouldn’t even dare to blink for the fear of losing out on a monumental moment. I can still clearly remember those feeling of awe and pride for my dad.

Today, I think it would take much more than eating raw onions to impress me.
When I think about it, I think it’s the innocence which gives us the strength to be impressed. When we are innocent, we have the strength to get impressed by the things that others can do and we can’t. We have the capacity to be in awe of somebody. But as we grow, we start becoming arrogant and cynic, whether we realize it or not. Instead of getting impressed and inspired by others’ talents, we try to find faults. We would move heaven and earth to prove the other person wrong, instead of learning that talent.

I think one of the greatest mystery of life is why do we lose our innocence and honesty as we grow old? Why can’t we just see the strengths of other people and be impressed by that? How tough could that be? Still it requires lot of strength to be like that.

I think this is a difficult concept for everybody to accept but those who have an ounce of self awareness will concede to this point. Also , even those who agree to it, won’t accept it in open. Hence, knowingly or unknowingly, everybody − including myself – is guilty of the sin of destroying the innocence and honesty within ourselves that we are born with.

I hope someday humankind would be strong enough to stop this kind of slaughter of our inner self and will preserve our innocence that God had intended for us.