Recently, I sat on the shore of an eerily calm pond with a reflection so brilliant I couldn’t tell sky from water. A small flat rock lay next to me, as if placed there exactly for this moment — to be skipped across the glass-like water! I swear the sky rippled for a brief moment…

As I watched the water return to mirror the sky, I looked down and saw my reflection. A boy, with his backwards cap and bright eyes, naïve to all life’s tribulations. A reflection I knew was merely an illusion of reality. In William Wordsworth’s Intimations of Immortality, he writes of recollections of his childhood:

There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream,
The earth, and every common sight
To me did seem
Apparelled in celestial light,
The glory and the freshness of a dream.

His eloquent words explain that humans start in an ideal world that slowly fades into a shadowy life. He continues with one of my favorite portions of the poem:

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting….
Shades of the prison-house begin to close
Upon the growing Boy,
But He beholds the light, and whence it flows,
He sees it in his joy. 

Many of us grow out of childhood, stricken by responsibility, disappointment, tragedy, or loss. We lose sight of the light that once resided in our younger minds as difficulties inevitably arise, hurt so often felt. As we age, we no longer see the world as ideal, but a cause of pain and misery. He concludes his writing with an affirmation that, though changed by time, as we become closer to our own mortality, we are once again able to remember the soul and light we once were:

Thanks to the human heart by which we live,
Thanks to its tenderness, its joys, and fears,
To me the meanest flower that blows can give
Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.

As I recalled my own childhood, I remembered the joys of simplicity. Full of dreams, my joy and zest for life was always apparent. Looking at my own reflection again in the pond, the image of that boy began to ripple and appeared a young man beginning to lose his “celestial light.” Witnessing death, tragedy, sorrow — among ones I love and patients I care for — slowly jades the mind of life’s joys. How do we not forget the “glory and freshness” of our childhood minds? How do we maintain our joy in our prime and stop the “shades of the prison house” from closing?

Reflect on your life often. Appreciate everything that is good, accept all that is bad. Let yourself feel pain, let tears descend upon your cheeks. Find the strength to heal, the courage to forgive. Every moment, every feeling is solitary in time. Just as the water reflects the sky, let your mind be still and it will once again reflect the child that always remains within you.

“Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one” — Albert Einstein