I am a child at heart. For the longest time, I have thought this to be my greatest weakness. And perhaps, in some ways, it is. But then I consider, perhaps there is a way to make one’s greatest weakness one’s greatest strength. When a weakness is first identified, one is apt to pick at it like a sore, for it has inevitably been the cause of great pain and suffering. When a weakness goes unidentified for a long time it naturally has been the source of great pain. But if one can identify the weakness for what it is, one can begin to let the damage done on its account heal. And after it heals, though there may be a visible scar, one can begin to present it in such a way that it becomes one’s most identifiable feature. In other words, it becomes something singular and beautiful.
I have always fallen in love way too easily. I have always been quick to identify beauty, and once I have identified it, I have wanted to possess it. This desire to possess is a very primitive and very childlike quality. But only a fool would consider it possible to possess beauty—to possess anything, for that matter, other than himself. Certainly, I have been a fool, more often than not. But the anguish that I feel in not being able to possess beauty I now know should never be compounded with the self-hatred rooted in the idea that there is something wrong with me for not being able to possess beauty. In other words, I have come to the moral understanding that beauty is something far too precious to be possessed, that to do so would mean destroying it.
In learning this lesson—that I cannot possess beauty without destroying it—I have discovered one joyous, immutable fact: I have it within me the power to create beauty. And I do not simply mean art. I can create beauty by looking at the trees, by smiling at the passersby, by holding a smooth stone in my hand. In other words, life itself is beautiful. And just as we cannot possess beauty, we cannot possess life. We can only live life, we can only create beauty. Unfortunately, so many come to destroy life, and destroy beauty in turn. And why? Because they have been deceived by the notion that they can possess these things. They have succumbed to the notion that they can make perfection of their lives by ending them, and failed to see the notion that each moment is perfection, is beautiful, and therefore, ungraspable.
A rose dies slowly, one petal at a time. But it’s act of dying is beautiful, and most beautiful when it happens slowly. When a man plucks a rose, he denies this beauty—he destroys it along with the rose’s life. And not only this, he denies the rest of the world the chance to behold the beauty of its slow death. It takes wisdom to allow anyone, or anything, to die according to its own nature, with the moral understanding that even pain is a reflection of God’s own will.
The part of ourselves which we most admire is naturally the part which we most desire to present to the rest of the world. But it turns out, sometimes the part of ourselves which we most admire is not our most admirable part. We mistake cruelty for good humor, brashness for courage, callousness for honesty. Therefore, wisdom is the understanding of what our true best self actually is, and projecting it upon the world. It is, in a word, innocence. To live actively, with all the character of maturity, while maintaining the innocence of a child.
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