“What we have to be is what we are.”
― Thomas Merton

I have become a victim to a humble state of fatigue. After days of resisting, I have finally given into going to the doctor tomorrow.
The thing I despise about being sick is that many of the emotional walls I have constructed fall and emotions surface. Its amazing how events from years ago still are buried deep down within. It makes sense I guess. We dont have time to properly mourn pains that should be grieved. And sometimes, even after we think we have properly grieved, we realize that the human heart isnt capable of completely erasing memories.
But to the credit of repression, we also cant function on a daily basis with being plagued by the past.
I tried to search and find a thread through the emerging emotion; was there a common element in the memories that were continually gnawing on my heart?
I realized in an instant that all these memories I was grieving were due to the loss of innocence; whether a part of my own or the loss of someone else's, what is it so deeply within humanity that wishes to maintain something that can never be returned?
I had a memory of an image. The image was the same one I had seen one night riding the bus in Buenos Aires about 9 months ago. I imagined one of my friends 10 years ago before I knew him. Now a man calloused by the world, a man possessed by an ambition that has already planted a deep seed of hatred towards himself, I saw him as he would have been ten years ago eating ice cream.
There he was, sitting on a table outside an ice cream shop, eating the melting ice cream illuminated by the city street lights. In the dark I stood across him. While speaking to each other, the words in the image were mute because the significance was within one simple moment. Bending over his cone, I saw an innocent boy who understood nothing of the complexities of life, and in that instance I suddenly knew that it was this simplicity that eternity is composed of.
I quickly turned my head from the window. The rain in the dark blurred my view and reminded me that I would never see his innocence.
What did thomas merton mean when he wrote this phrase: what we have to be is what we are? Did he mean, as the great writer Gabriel Garcia Marquez wrote,“In the end, it is impossible not to become what others believe you are.”
Or was it that we are destined to become whatever virtue or vice is developing our character?
Regardless, I have concluded that though people will eventually lose their childlike innocence, it does not mean that they cant cultivate a simplicity or sincerity about life that are both forms of innocence. And while I can grieve over the calloused hearts that have taken over so many people, I can have hope that God will one day restore.