When, in a drinking session, someone suddenly tells you, “your naivete is what I love the most about you” it makes you stop and think. Especially when you’ve been, of late, trying to pass yourself off to those who don’t know better as a world-wise twenty-something sophisticate, right at home in a generation that thinks cynicism is chic.
So I’m naïve.
I believe in being part of a struggle much bigger than yourself; daring to reach for a heaven far beyond your grasp; doing your part to assuage wounds wrought by many lifetimes of strife and knowing that it will take double that number of lifetimes to completely heal.
I can look every bully in the eye and I know I will not flinch. Very few things threaten me – probably more the result of the brashness of youth than the wisdom of years.
I think the best kind of job is not the job that gets you a fat paycheck or gives you generous car plan. It’s the job that makes you sleep well at night and eager to get up the next day. I love knowing that I’m working with the good guys – and drinking with them later at night.
I believe that the fire in my belly can quell the butterflies in my tummy, and that my phantoms are no match for my passions.
I maintain that the Left is right (but also that social justice is impossible without procedural due process).
I believe in love, purely and utterly: insisting on it, finding it, keeping it, allowing yourself to be swept off your feet by the violence of its current but at the same time rocked to gentle sleep in the constancy of its embrace.
I believe in the certainty and constancy of my friendships.
I believe I’m fabulous and beautiful, and if you don’t agree with me, that’s because you’re wrong.
I would say I believe in a Higher Being that holds everything together, and allows us to find that glint of light amidst hunger and cancer and injustice and oppression —-
But then, that’s not naivete anymore. That’s faith.
