Change

Can the Child within my Heart Rise Above?

“Time makes you bolder, children get older. I’m getting older.”

These lines whisper of a delicate tension: the desire to unburden, yet finding fragments of ourselves clinging to the very past we long to shed. It is a sacred pause to acknowledge all that is old and ending—to salute the enduring strengths and the intricate defenses that allowed us to survive what aimed to extinguish, and sometimes did diminish, our innocence.

I recall a contemplative man I met in a cemetery, a man desperately seeking sobriety, yet finding it so elusive. For him, the escape into alcohol use came to embody all his pain, while sobriety represented the life he yearned to live. This was his song on that particular day. We listened to it together in solitude, no words exchanged between us. Having met many times before, it was simply the silence, and these lyrics, that brought a profound sense of stillness and grace to that day. Perhaps, for him, that day and its unspoken surrender represented another step toward beginning again.