The Growing Pains of Naivety

A tiny flower bouquet I made

I look at the world very symbolically. Small meaningless acts, to me, have power in the bigger picture. For example, although I have nothing against the physical object of a shoe, I have held a grudge against them for as long as I can remember, insisting on going barefoot whenever I could. Shoes could be viewed as symbolic of the way we detach ourselves from the moment, and from nature. The way we are scared to feel because the thrill of simply feeling could scar us later. The way we prefer to put a barrier up between us and the world, us and the ground, us and each other...



 I have a probably impractically optimistic view on an individual's ability to impact the world: sometimes stating fiercely that my life will have been purposeless until I manage to make a huge world-peace like change, and then turning around and recognizing that smiling at the mailman could alter the course of history. (This is actually a much larger issue that I relate to my inability to live by Aristotle's theory of moderation.)


I can be overbearing about these opinions, wanting to debate and argue with people until they can at least see where I am coming from. Other times, thinking about them in silence until I dissolve into tears. Unable to put into words, what wreaks havoc in my mind. I'm generally at war with myself. Consumed in thought. A person who believes passionately in arguments on either side of the spectrum.


This summer, I've begun to interpret this internal struggle as the result of the growing pains of really understanding reality. Spending more time in society, you learn to interpret the world by the sometimes hard and cold truth of what it really is, as opposed to the gleaming sheen of prospect and optimism you viewed it through as a little kid. As a fourth grader, I was certain I could save species from extinction by donating to the WWF on my birthday, in retrospect I realize it was probably just an imperceptively small dent in the issue. That realization hurts a little and you are suddenly, almost by necessity, out growing your own naivety.


And maybe eventually I will actually grow up and get over it. Maybe someday I will wake up and realize that the small acts that I held with so much significance are nothing and have never been. Maybe I'll wake up and realize that as 1 in 7 billion I cannot make a change. And maybe that is the issue.


Maybe this expectation to get over it...to see the impossibly high mountains of problems and issues through a crystal clear and pragmatic lens, a lens in which you are inexplicably small and helpless, a world in which you will realistically make zero impact....is where we all go wrong.


Maybe...if I held onto the prospect that the little things...a few seconds of stolen eye contact, brown leaves littering the ground in fall, rain thundering against the window pane...mean everything. If I kept that overly optimistic idea that, as a single individual, deciding to recycle, or go vegetarian, or help out a homeless shelter...is actually making a difference.


Because if all 7 billion people on the planet stare up at the ceiling every night, coming to the realization that they are small and no matter how much effort they throw into the causes that matter to them, objectively speaking, nothing is going to happen, then nothing will.


But maybe...if we all hold onto that "child-like" piece of hopeful optimism...there could be enough individual man-power to knock the earth out of orbit (figuratively speaking.) That maybe one optimistic teenager belligerently going vegetarian to save the environment, is naive, but 7 billion of us taking a bit of advice from the little kid we used to be...is change.


Powered by optimism (Life is Good™),


Victoria