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Is Innocence love?

Sometimes I think about this. Is innocence love?

Innocence is mostly recognized in children, whom are definitely not sinless. Children don't have to try to be innocent, we are the ones who call them innocent because they oblivious to the rules of social engagement and mostly don't care. Adults can try to be innocent too, avoiding offenses, insistently trying not to hurt people at least if they can help it. It is true that when you love people you try not to hurt them, but can you be innocent and still hurt someone?
I think so.

Thing with innocence it, it feels like you're going around trying to please everyone, and that can come from a gaping emptiness, a void at the soul level, a desire for intimacy that manifests itself in giving, hoping for reciprocation.

I know this feeling. Sometimes, when I am kind to people, it is because I do not want trouble, or because I want them to go away knowing I caused their smile. It feels really good when someone smiles at you for a good reason, not transactionally, not to try to make you feel better, so them can feel better themselves, that is transaction too, and I remember a lot of people I've felt like this with, and how it all broke down in time. It will always break down.
Bit it felt good. I can't take that away. I'm a greedy person if I start looking for smiles that never fade, but the truth about those transactional smiles cannot be overcome.
Someday, strangers that once became friends and smiled at each other will pass each other by and not utter a single word. I dread that day.

Once I heard a voice telling me that all love is transaction, and God converts it to love. I agree. The problem with transaction love is it can leave you emptier than you started. All our love is a cope, but if you ask us to try and love truly, you are asking us to suffer. The assurance with innocence is, if you manage to relate with others without putting expectations on them, you can see yourself cower from confrontations, avoiding them. This isn't always ideal, and can spell a spate of self-protection through rightness, a reaction to being hurt.

To unfold your emotions properly is hard, and we settle for less than ideal expressions of the same, understandably.

We cannot ask love to be innocence. Love as we know it must transact, and intentional self-innocence is self-protection. However, we can look for what innocence means when it is not about anything but itself. Just innocence, when you're not trying to justify yourself by pointing out your high ideals and how you live by them unfailingly daily, not asking your neighbour not to hurt you simply because you don't hurt them. Just innocence. Just you, not the rules.

All my self-righteousness I must throw away at this point, because I have held on to the idea that when I do right by people then I am showing them love. Yes and no. This one is transactional. I value the niceness in the relationship between myself and them. It is a transaction I want to uphold. I am afraid of hating on them. It will muddy the waters between us. Then I am shown to have been keeping the rules.

What is left? I don't know anything about love all of a sudden, I just know it is not many things, including innocence. I don't even know what innocence truly is. I couldn't act innocent to save my life.

Children are innocent, I think, what word could sufficiently describe how children act?