When doth the sleeping wake?

The greatest battle one will ever face is that between innocence and experience. We are born into the world asleep. We lack any transient thoughts. There is no judging. There is no drama. We look at everything as an empty cup waiting to be filled. We are, in essence, ignorant. So we are open minded. We can accept anything. and we don't have to worry about any sort of tragedy. Our future is a mere fantasy. We can barely even conceive consequences. We are blind to everything and are therefore the happiest we could ever be. We do just to do and think nothing of it.

But, as we grow older, we begin to awaken to what the world really is. The emotional pain, the sexual happenings, the drugs, etc. We learn about everything. It varies from person to person when you learn these things. Nowadays, the generations are learning it at a younger and younger age. They miss out on their childhood. What it's like to feel free from the constraints of worry and fear. And the more experienced you get, the faster the process goes. It is an exponential growth of knowledge.

From this, our society is endowed with the pursuit of knowledge. We strive to find more and more answers. We look to satisfy all our needs, whether it is our natural human curiosity or our need for pleasure. We hunger more and more and it guides our actions. We look at things through new eyes. We fill our cup with empty answers. We close our minds to new and different possibilities. This causes us to judge. To hate. To commit great acts of violence against one another because we think we are doing right. The experience drives us to lose our own humanity, whether on a small or large scale.

Society as a whole is losing sight of what matters because we refuse to remember where we came from. Oscar Wilde once said "I am not young enough to know everything." The young have such open minds so they are able to learn more than any older person could dream of learning. We think we find an answer and automatically close the case when in fact we should keep everything open. There is always more to something. Always.

J.D. Salinger understands this battle and writes about it in Catcher in the Rye. if you get past the whiny kid milking his teenage angst to death, you can see what is trying to be said. Growing up is hard. Especially in those years between innocence and experience. You're losing touch with the darkness, the security blanket, and seeing the light, the true pain, but also the true love. You can experience a greater spectrum of emotion and knowledge, but the pendulum must swing both ways. It is a trade we all are forced to make. We can experience more of life, but on both extremes of emotion.

Innocence and experience really boils down to knowledge. How much of it you have or lack. In all aspects of life. It is inevitable we all learn more and therefore have a need to learn even more. Fulfill these needs we discover. But that doesn't mean we should forget where it all began. Remember what it was like to have a childlike sense of wonder. What it's like to look at the world with happy eyes. Think the best of it. Open up to all possibilities.