Messiness

Have you ever noticed that life is messy?

We are born into this world knowing absolutely nothing.  We don’t even know where we begin and where another ends.  Our brains teach us to make sense of the world.  To seek patterns.  To determine the absolutes.

And we do.  We determine the good guys and the bad guys.  We determine right and wrong, moral and immoral, possible and impossible.  Things start to make sense.  We can maneuver through this world.

But then the facade starts to crumble.  We age and we break out the cocoons we created and that we resided in.  We start to see more of the world and more of people.  We learn that the world is bigger than what we know, that evil is more rampant than what we have faced.  We learn that good and bad exist but that the notion of good and bad people is more a construct of our hopes than of our reality.  There are no all good people.  There are no all bad people.  People are a mix of both.  Our world is a mix of both.

And often, this leaves us standing with our jaws dropped and our worlds shaken.

As grown ups, we know logically that mistakes happen.  We know that people mess up.  That the line between good and bad is fuzzy at best and almost nonexistent at worst.  But I’m not sure we fully know how to deal with it.

And how would we?

How do we make sense out of a world that seems so random?  How do we trust when the foundations of that trust can be shattered so easily?  How do we wake up in the morning and go to sleep at night when during the course of an average day, so much can be turned upside down?

And how do we teach our children?  We want to teach them that the world is safe and that good is good and bad is bad.  They need to learn this.  Their minds are too fragile not to believe this.  They have an absolute right to believe this during the years when they can believe this, and they have a right to be protected from lessons that will teach them the contrary.

But the world doesn’t necessarily want them to know this.  The world doesn’t respect the boundaries we place around their knowledge.  The world doesn’t want their innocence or their purity.  It wants to teach them lessons that they aren’t ready to learn.

I can’t heal this world.  I can’t make it clean.  I can’t tidy up the messy that keeps infringing on our sacred circle every chance it gets.

But I can do my best to make sure that it doesn’t infringe on my kids, on my family.  That they get to stay pure and innocent as long as they possibly can.

I can’t protect my own heart and all of your hearts from the messiness of this world, but I will surely do everything within my power to protect theirs.  For as long as possible.  Because once it’s lost…