Thinking/Feeling Back

Do you ever think back to what you were like when you were younger? How about feeling back to try to reconstruct your emotions and sense of self? I’ve been afraid that in some ways, age 14 was my best — I was spiritually awakened, doing well in school, and generally happy. And that since then, I haven’t done quite as well, due to various bad habits and insistent selfishness.

Of course, that decline can’t be real, since in some essential way, we are always advancing — learning, developing, seeing more than we did before. So I must have made progress since then. That was a big year, though, and I have to mention that spiritual awakening thing again, because it was the first time I felt a deep responsibility for my own choices, rather than following along (or not) with what I was told to do. I’ve thought back to that awakening many times, trying to hold on to its momentousness, to remind myself what a huge responsibility it is to have free will, and what the consequences are of using it properly or wasting it.

But there are other times that are also important to think of — other me’s that I need to reach out to and remember — and sometimes they surface unexpectedly. Like this morning, when I woke up early (because I had gone to sleep at the same time as Georgia and Maya, rather than staying up late). I had the time (and energy) to say the Bahá’í Long Obligatory Prayer, which I haven’t very often lately, what with all this family-raising going on. Anyway, I felt an old, old state coming back. An early feeling of conscious choice. It was unexpected, and probably worth paying attention to, since it wasn’t forced (unlike my attempts to remember being fourteen). I remembered the feeling of choosing, as a small child, probably three or four years old, between “doing good” and “not doing good”, and deciding that I really had nothing to lose by “doing good” — after all, if God, my soul, et. al. really existed, then I was indubitably better off doing good, but if, on the other hand, life ended arbitrarily with death (a worst-case scenario), then I really didn’t have anything to lose by doing good. So what the heck, there was no logical reason not to do good, and very possibly a good reason to do it. It may actually not have been so much a reason to do it, but a rationalization for doing good — that it was reasonable behavior and therefore acceptable — and a reason to not experiment energetically with the alternatives. In short, I remember making a conscious choice to do good, aware that it may deprive me of some interesting experiences.

It sounds kind of guarded when I describe it, but my feeling about it was very open and innocent. And more than the particular line of reasoning, it was that openness and innocence that I remembered this morning — the feeling more than the thoughts or any specific memories. It was very refreshing. And it meant that that feeling still exists within me somewhere. I think the combination of prayer and being around my own children, who are approaching the world just as innocently and openly, helped bring it out.